Given that the original voice and piano version of Shostakovich’s largest song-cycle is not listed at all in the current catalogue, it is particularly frustrating to have this organ transcription, here not exceptionally well played, on an unsuitable instrument, and with a less than wonderful vocalist. The organ of the Glinka Museum in Moscow lends an inappropriately pious quality to Michelangelo’s love poems and sounds comically underpowered when compared either with the piano originals or to the composer’s own orchestral version. The very opening, blared out by trumpets in Shostakovich’s orchestration, here just sounds feeble. What’s more, Alexandre Naoumenko is short of breath and tone in his first phrase, and at 2'15'' in the first song the organ comes in a beat early (could this be a fault in the transcription?). Although the remaining songs aren’t so bad, the organ playing is by no means clean, and Naumenko’s voice has little colour or variety. The final song is both played and sung far too loudly, and the crucial harmony at 3'50'' is either mistranscribed or misplayed. Token applause, from what sounds like a small audience, has inadvisedly been left in.
Again the instrument is utterly inadequate to Shostakovich’s own transcription of the mighty ‘Passacaglia’ from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, and it doesn’t help matters that a telephone goes off in a quiet passage around 7'00''. For an altogether more dramatic and imposing account of this piece I recommend Keith John on Priory.
The extracts from The Bolt are fun. Here Herve Desarbre persuades the Schuke instrument to give a passing imitation of a wheezy fairground organ, more successfully, it must be said, than Maria Makarova on the Cavaille-Coll at Moscow Conservatory; indeed, her all-Shostakovich disc is another sadly unsatisfactory affair. There is little to be said for the Limpid Stream pieces, however, and in the circumstances I wouldn’t feel like making any pronouncements on Boris Tishchenko’s musical portrait of his teacher – it sounds only moderately interesting, but it might be a good deal more so in another performance. The best feature in this whole dubious enterprise is the booklet-essay by Frans Lemaire.'