While British audiences are used to pondering the pros and cons of music under the Soviets, we have paid relatively scant attention to composers from other Communist regimes. Scores of Chinese composers have emigrated to America in the past 20 years, of whom Bright Sheng has been one of the most successful, championed by Leonard Bernstein and, now, Gerard Schwarz. His 1988 orchestral work H'un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-76 is an emotional depiction and contemplation of Mao's brutal Cultural Revolution. Its division into two sections - the first violent and fragmented, the second slow and sustained - presents a programmatic depiction of the terror of those years and the composer's own shock and sadness. As such, H'un's two parts are so starkly polarised they can sound too direct for comfort. But this work isn't meant to be comfortable: its anguished gestures are intended to sound, quite literally, lacerating.
As a lifelong Soviet composer, Shostakovich never developed an emigre voice. But he did get the chance to reflect on the Stalinist regime in the early years of Khrushchev's "thaw", when he and many other Soviet artists carried the process of de-Stalinisation into the arts. His Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, setting verses by the young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, marked his last major brush with the Soviet authorities, who objected to its denunciation of Soviet anti-semitism. Bass Gidon Saks intoned every word with solemn conviction, though he was rather feebly supported by the male voices of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir. The orchestral playing made up for that weakness, though: Humour had an aggressive cheekiness, while In the Store - a compassionate portrayal of Soviet women queuing for food - had a shuffling inexorability, framed beautifully by a reverent, almost religious, ending. The chorus rallied for the humorous rhyming scansion of A Career, and for the gentle mass-song parody in the middle of Fears, one of Shostakovich's most convincing forays into that quintessentially Soviet style.
·Repeated tonight. Box office: 0151-709 3789.
