Elmar Oliveira, Gerard Schwarz & Seattle Symphony Orchestra - Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1 & Symphony No. 6 (2000)

These are wonderful performances, incredibly virtuosic, profoundly dramatic, and tremendously exciting. Violinist Elmar Oliveira has the guts to take on Shostakovich's harrowing Violin Concerto No. 1 and he has the strength, the sensitivity, and the sheer stubbornness to get through from its anguished opening Nocturne to its exhilarated closing Burlesca. Conductor Gerard Schwarz has the chops to cover Oliveira's back in the Concerto, the backbone to take the opening Largo from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6 with immense weight and gravity, and the courage to charge through the closing Presto of the Symphony like a circus band gone mad. The Seattle Symphony plays with more panache, more power, and more compassion than most of their brothers and sisters to the east and south. Producers Laura Harth Rodriguez, Al Swanson, Dmitri Lipai, and Adam Stern make a bigger and better sound than most of their older relatives in the industry. While everyone should hear one of David Oistrakh's magisterial recordings of the Concerto and either Kondrashin's massive or Mravinsky's maniacal recordings of the Symphony, Oliveira and Schwarz recording is well worth hearing on its own merits.