During the first years
of its existence the "Leningrad"
was probably the most successful new
symphony of the whole 20th
century. Shostakovich wrote the first
three movements so to speak "on
site" in the besieged city between
July and September 1941. In October
that year the authorities evacuated
him and his family to Kuibyshev, where
he completed the final movement in December.
The first performance was given in his
new hometown in March 1942 and in July
Toscanini, who was sent a microfilmed
score, played it in New York. During
the next concert season the symphony
was performed more than sixty times
in the US alone and soon it was being
played all over Europe as well. After
these first years of intense exploitation
it gradually faded. Maybe not into oblivion,
but amidst the admiration critical voices
also were heard, commenting on "empty
rhetoric", "banality"
etc. Even the gentle Bela Bartók
showed his dissatisfaction, memorably
quoting the insistent "War"
theme in his Concerto for Orchestra,
where he makes the brass laugh at the
music. In later years it has been stated
that the symphony’s extra-musical "theme"
is not so much the war and the German
siege, but rather a portrayal of Stalin’s
terror of the Russian people.
Be that as it may.
Having some kind of programmatic background
is a help when listening. I have always
felt this – and some other symphonies
– to be the musical equivalent to socialistic
pictorial art from the 1930s and 1940s.
I happened to visit an exhibition at
the Ciasma Art Centre in Helsinki a
year or two ago, where they exhibited
Soviet posters and I immediately drew
the parallel: rough-hewn faces, in some
strange way dehumanized, glaring colours,
aggressive postures, few nuances. I
wouldn’t go as far as saying that Shostakovich
lacks nuances, but often his palette
contains glaring colours and he applies
them with a palette-knife or very broad
brush-strokes. But there is no denying
that he can also be delicate and he
sometimes sprinkles woodwind solos over
the canvas, just as Rembrandt lets the
reflexes of the hidden light brighten
up his generally dark paintings.
Dmitry Yablonsky, in
the first recording of what is supposed
to be a complete symphony cycle, gives
a powerful reading of this score, reinforced
by the surround sound recording, which
on my machine gave impressive results.
It is a detailed and at the same time
well integrated sound picture with wide
dynamics, so wide that when playing
at a volume where I could clearly hear
the hushed strings and the woodwind
in the "pastoral" of the first
movement, I was decidedly unsocial when
the following side drum accompanied
crescendo reached its peak. The orchestra,
mainly a recording orchestra but nowadays
also giving concerts, sounds good, lacking
the subtlety of some of the world class
ensembles, but in this music it works
well. I hadn’t listen to this work for
quite some time, but quite soon I was
wholly engrossed in the performance
and during this five-quarter-long traversal
of the score I more than once conjured
up visual memories of a visit to Leningrad
35 years ago, saw again the tank set
up on a concrete foundation by the side
of the main road to Leningrad as a reminder
of the war.
Comparisons can sometimes
be odious to a performance one spontaneously
likes. My touch-stone version has for
many years been The Leningrad Philharmonic
under Mariss Jansons, whom I heard at
a concert in Stockholm in the late 1980s
at about the same time that they recorded
the symphony for EMI. I never bought
that recording but found it at my local
library. Unfortunately the disc was
seriously damaged so I could only play
portions of it, but what I heard was
a deeper, fuller string tone and an
even more homogenous body of sound.
Interpretatively Jansons seemed more
eager, more flexible, even wilder in
places. I also own, since many years,
Neeme Järvi’s Chandos recording
with the Scottish National Orchestra
and his is an even more eager and alert
reading. He starts the proceedings at
considerably faster speed, then he makes
much more of the lovely pastoral section,
where Yablonsky looses momentum, and
the war crescendo becomes, in Järvi’s
hands, an orgy in barbaric sounds. All
over Järvi’s version is nearly
five minutes shorter, and most of the
difference lies in the finale which
has a springiness and vitality head
and shoulders above Yablonsky’s.
Still, on its own merits,
Yablonsky’s version is good, the sound
is thrilling and it can be safely recommended
to anyone wanting it in surround sound.
Göran Forsling
see
also review by Paul Shoemaker, Colin
Clarke and John Phillips
Russian Philharmonic Orchestra/Dmitry Yablonsky
NAXOS
6.110020 SACD [75:17] 
