The best known of his chamber works, Dmitri Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet was something of a watershed, an outpouring of grief and rage full of supposedly autobiographical self-reference and quotation. Moscow Chamber Orchestra founder Rudolf Barshai received the composer's permission to recast the quartet as a string orchestra piece, and in this guise it is known as the Chamber Symphony Op. 110a. Now the orchestra's American born director Constantine Orbelian leads them in an appropriately dark-toned performance of this harrowing music, captured vividly by Delos at Skywalker Sound in California. The Concerto for Piano and Strings of Alfred Schnittke is a more mysterious affair, with long, introspective piano monologues, placidly repeated triadic figures reminiscent of the 'Moonlight' Sonata placed against a background of melting string clusters, and the prominence of an emphatic three note scale motif. These rhetorical devices are placed in a kind of "night music" atmosphere, occasionally recalling the fantastic film scores of Bernard Herrmann.
