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SHOSTAKOVICH: THE EXECUTION OF STEPAN RAZIN and SYMPHONY NO. 9 (Melodiya-Angel). Razin was a 17th century Cossack rake who divided his energies between pillaging the Volga Valley and leading whole cities in uprisings against the Czar. When he was finally captured and executed, his severed head, so goes the legend, continued to shout defiance and inspired further rebellions. Evgeny Evtushenko has put the story in poetry, and Shostakovich here sets the theme to unabashedly patriotic music. Sung in stirring form by Bass Vitaly Gromadsky.
SHOSTAKOVICH: SYMPHONY NO. 5 (Melodiya-Angel). The Fifth is Shostakovich's best-known work, part of the repertory of most major orchestras. In the U.S. it has been associated with Leonard Bernstein, who helped to popularize it and who has made a stunningly dramatic recording. Kiril Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic are more lyrical and reflective, so that the first and third movements have special eloquence—emotional search and intellectual despair.
The bargains:
BRAHMS: THE FOUR SYMPHONIES (4 LPs; Stereo Treasury). There are few better buys than this album. Rafael Kubelik leads the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance that is full of virtues: lustrous, well-balanced orchestral sound, particularly expansive winds, spirited pace. Kubelik's Brahms is never ponderous, nor does he go for the floods and eddies of sound that mar the more Wagnerian interpretations.
HAYDN: SYMPHONIES NOS. 1, 2 and 3 (Odyssey). The late Max Goberman was a protean figure on the New York musical scene. He was pit conductor for West Side Story, and his ambition was to record all 104 symphonies of Haydn. This record is the elegant overture to the unfinished project—a crisp, clear reading that points up Haydn's melodic questions and answers, the asides and one-liners that crowd his scores.
BEETHOVEN: EMPEROR CONCERTO (Odyssey). Walter Gieseking made the recording in London shortly before his death in 1956, and it is a fitting final statement by a major interpreter of Beethoven. Herbert von Karajan conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in a fiery, romantic interpretation of the masterpiece.
CINEMA
LA GUERRE EST FINIE. Director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour) explores the mind of an old-guard Spanish Civil War Communist (Yves Montand), and builds a biography that may be overly literary but is never tedious.
YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW. Writer-Director Francis Ford Coppola, 27, exudes energy, freshness and promise in his first major film—a wacky farce about a Little Boy Blue (Peter Kastner) who turns out to be as green as they come when he tries to paint the town red.
BLOWUP. Italy's anatomist of melancholy, Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura), moves his cameras to London, where he commences by filming the mod scene with abandon and then, in midflight, abruptly transforms an ingenious thriller into an opaque parable. The result is one of the most talked-about and popular films around.
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. Paul Scofield's magnificent portrayal of Sir Thomas More again graces Robert Bolt's witty, thoughtful play, with some cinematographic dividends added.
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