Symphony 7 Leningrad
In Kurt Masur's straightforward and superbly recorded performance of Shostakovich's wartime Symphony No.7 ("Leningrad"), the listener can feel the composer's deep sense of loss for the devastation visited upon his native city, first by Stalin's Great Terror and then by the Nazis' 900-day siege, in which nearly a million civilians died from bombs, starvation, and exposure. The orchestral playing is suitably intense; the strings are rich-sounding and the brass powerful and brilliant. What keeps this performance from reaching the pinnacle achieved in a1996 recordingby Yuri Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic is a slight lack of rhythmic flexibility. In the work's final moments, for example, Masur maintains a strict tempo, while Temirkanov takes a Furtwängler-like retard that milks every ounce of the music's grandeur and excitement. In the first movement, Masur misses some of the movement's longing because, unlike Temirkanov, he does not sufficiently differentiate the March section from more relaxed episodes, in which the music seems to dissolve in a dreamy haze of sound. Masur is also less successful in capturing the Mahler-like keening of the third. And, wonderfully played as it is, Masur's finale is not as convincing as Temirkanov's. Without going over the top, Temirkanov's fervor and panache create visceral excitement in this otherwise rambling movement that Masur, for all his virtues, cannot match.--Stephen Wigler