Gianandrea Noseda

Gianandrea Noseda, London Symphony Orchestra – Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos 6 & 15 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:16:48 minutes | 2,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live

Following the success of his Fifth Symphony, all eyes were on Shostakovich to create a work that would measure up to its predecessor. The Sixth was originally intended as an immense musical monument to Lenin, to be woven with heroic melodies and folk songs. Instead his audiences were surprised to hear a quite different result—a contemplative, restrained first movement that morphs puzzlingly into a ferocious ending.

The Fifteenth is another of Shostakovich’s musical enigmas, with inexplicable quotes from music by Rossini, Glinka and Wagner dotted throughout, alongside references to his own music from his younger years. Written in 1970–71 when the composer’s health was declining, this final symphony is one of fond reflection.

Together these unconventional works showcase Shostakovich’s range as a composer—from wild exuberance to quiet introspection.

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London Symphony Orchestra & Gianandrea Noseda – Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 – Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:17 minutes | 1,41 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live

Widely recognized as one of the leading conductors of his generation, LSO Principal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda presents a work of concentrated emotional intensity in the first of a new series exploring Tchaikovsky’s final three symphonies. Urgent, supercharged and violent in places, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth is said to reflect the turmoil he found himself in while composing: a disastrous marriage, struggles with his sexuality and severe depression. Yet, despite the gloomy outlook, the symphony proves undoubtedly that Tchaikovsky knew how to fill his works with memorable melodies. Known for his mastery of Russian repertoire, for this album Noseda pairs Tchaikovsky with a masterpiece by his fellow countryman, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, performed here in Ravel’s iconic orchestration.

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London Symphony Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:59 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © LSO Live

“Certain moments in history gave composers the possibility of saying something deeply personal”, says LSO Principal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda. “And Shostakovich speaks equally to us today.” As Noseda and the LSO continue their journey through Shostakovich’s symphonies, which span the composer’s lifetime, they take on one of his biggest creations, the Seventh. Written during the siege of Leningrad in World War II, it is shattering in scale and impact. For Noseda, “you can hear the march of the soldiers, the obsessive repetition, a loop you cannot escape,” in the relentless, pounding rhythms, the struggle towards a fragile victory.
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London Symphony Orchestra & Gianandrea Noseda – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:07 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live

Composed against a cataclysmic backdrop of Stalinist oppression and the Second World War, Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony is a deeply affecting poem of suffering. The composer described it as ‘an attempt to reflect the terrible tragedy of war’, and it contains some of the most terrifying music he ever wrote. Here, Gianandrea Noseda conducts the London Symphony Orchestra with intensity and understanding, allowing the music to tell its own story as it travels from darkness into light, yearning more for peace than for victory. One of the leading conductors of his generation, Gianandrea Noseda holds several high-profile international positions in addition to his role as Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, including Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC. His previous releases on LSO Live include acclaimed interpretations of the Verdi Requiem and Britten War Requiem, and this recording follows the digital release of Shostakovich: Symphony No 5, which will receive a full release in October 2019 coupled with the composer’s First Symphony.

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London Symphony Orchestra & Gianandrea Noseda – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 48:11 minutes | 909 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live

This new LSO recording only available in digital format marks the start of a new recorded cycle by the London Symphony Orchestra with their current principal guest conductor, Gianandrea Noseda. Recorded at a public concert on 22 September 2016, thisFifth by Shostakovich fulfils the promise of the score. Under a venomous barrage from Pravda on the orders of the dread you-know-who, which brought down his 1936 opera Lady Macbeth, the luckless composer withdrew the work from the programme of the orchestra which was set to perform it, and the symphony was only brought back out in 1962. By way of response to accusations of bourgeois opacity, anti-Soviet deviation and all manner of other bullsh– er, communist epithets, Shostakovich threw himself into his Fifth, which he finished in July 1937. The creation of the work took place in the wake under the baton of Evgeni Mravinski and met with great success, not only in the USSR, but right across the music world, which lapped up the work. Yes, the language is clearer, and less esoteric than the Fourth, but anyone looking for optimism and good cheer is barking up the wrong tree. The Scherzo is a sinister flight forward by a tortured clown, and the Largo is what it is – anguished. As for the final movement, it alternates between Rossinian farce and Mahlerian snarling, ending with two minutes of the kind of joy that one feels after having been run over by a division of Soviet tanks. Conductor Gianandrea Noseda and the members of the London Symphony Orchestra knew how to project this dual atmosphere and really capture the enigmatic feel of the final two minutes. This symphony is the response of the composer to the Stalinist murderers, all the while declaring in Pravda that the piece was “a Soviet artist’s practical response to well-deserved criticism”. Comments that some musicologists recuse, considering that they would have been commissionned from the high places of politics. Whatever it is, what a mockery by the composer through his symphony!

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London Symphony Orchestra & Gianandrea Noseda – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:39 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live

Shostakovich at one point thought his Fourth Symphony was the best thing he’d ever written. Extravagant and challenging in equal measure, it’s a work of epic proportions, requiring over 100 musicians including large percussion and brass sections. Owing to Soviet censure, the work went unperformed for almost 30 years after it was completed, until in 1961 it was revealed as one of the significant milestones of the composer’s output, the work that solidified him as a master symphonist.

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London Symphony Orchestra & Gianandrea Noseda – Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 9 & 10 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:04 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live

For Gianandrea Noseda, the Ninth is Shostakovich at his most ‘classical’, but a modern statement nonetheless. “Stalin wanted a celebration of the victory of Russia, and Shostakovich came out with a sort of opera buffa symphony”, the LSO’s Principal Guest Conductor says. “Short, witty, lots of sarcasm. I can really feel his wish to go against what was expected of him”. The Tenth Symphony was written after Stalin’s death and allegedly portrays the tragedy, despair, terror and violence of his tenure. The second movement is a musical portrait of Stalin, a march of unremitting terror and frenzied violence, while the finale contains some of the slowest music of the whole symphony, a reminder of the desolation of the Gulag prisoners.

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London Symphony Orchestra & Gianandrea Noseda – Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 14:01 minutes | 425 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LSO Live

The past and the contemporary meet on this DSD EP, as Gianandrea Noseda conducts the London Symphony Orchestra performing Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1. At once something entirely new, yet reaching back to a time gone by.

For his first symphony, Prokofiev, in characteristic style, decided to do the opposite of what was expected of him. The work was composed in 1917, but instead of capturing the turbulence of Revolutionary Russia, Prokofiev kept the work at a distance from political upheaval, making Haydn and Mozart his muses, and writing a work that sparkles with wit, buoyancy and playfulness.

Nick Boston at Bachtrack says “Noseda and the LSO achieved a good balance here between accentuating the wit and edge, whilst maintaining ‘classical’ precision and simplicity, avoiding simplistic pastiche.”

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