Shostakovich: Complete Songs, Vol. 1.

* Evtodieva, Biryukova; Lukonin, Kuznetsov; Serov, piano. Transliterations and translations. Delos DE 3304

SHOSTAKOVICH: Complete Songs, Vol. 2

* Evtodieva, Sokolova; Kuznetsov; Kovalenko, violin; Molokina, cello; Serov, piano. Transliterations and translations. Delos DE 3307

Volume II in the Delos series of the complete songs of Shostakovich is worth buying for the first cut alone. This 1966 song, drily titled "A Foreword to My Complete Works and a Brief Contemplation with Respect to This Foreword," was written specifically for a gala sixtieth-birthday concert of his own works. In it, the composer makes fun of himself, the one-time condemnation of his music and his celebrated status at the time of the song's composition, all at once. The music is ponderous, pounding and dissonant, a send-up of all the qualities once deemed "decadent" and "formalist" by the Soviet authorities. "I scribble on paper in a spurt;/Then I hear catcalls ... /Then I torment the ears of all the world," Shostakovich declares in the text (intoned with marvelously mocking gravity by the cavernous bass voice of Fyodor Kuznetsov). At the end, he lists some of the "quite important responsibilities and positions" he now holds. It's wickedly droll, and also rather shocking to hear Shostakovich openly ridiculing Soviet officialdom like this.

The freedom of an artist to create as he pleases, free from state-imposed strictures, is in fact the subtext (if not the actual text) of nearly all the works on this disc, all culled from the last decade of Shostakovich's life. The point is made most explicitly in two songs from Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva. "The Poet and the Tsar" begins with mock-celebratory music, as the singer beholds a marble statue of Tsar Nicholas I. But Tsar Nicholas, the "Wretched watchman/Of Pushkin's glory," is dubbed "Singerkiller" by the end of the song. "The Drum Did Beat," an equally scathing account, describes ...