Perhaps I've listened to too many Shostakovich Fifths lately; I must confess that I was not greatly looking forward to another, and from (set beside the distinguished list of names above) unseeded players, too. It was a great pleasure to have my prejudices destroyed within a few pages. Yoel Levi is obviously a very fine conductor indeed, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra play like heroes. These readings are among the very best of either symphony on record; indeed, at the end of Levi's Ninth (irresistibly exuberant, but with that poignantly elegiac Largo audibly casting shadows backward to the second movement as well as onward into the finale's only gradually cast off anxiety) I was ready to recommend this coupling above all its rivals.
Come now, said I to myself, you've managed in the past to pick ungrateful holes in Decca's overly sumptuous recording for Haitink and their subfusc sound for Ashkenazy, in Kondrashin's (Le Chant du Monde/Harmonia Mundi) hasty way with the first movement of the Fifth and Rozhdestvensky's (Olympia/Target) slight aroma of greasepaint; surely you can contrive to find something disagreeable to say about Levi, his orchestra or the Telarc engineers? Well, I suppose I could observe that Levi's intensification of the climax of the Fifth's first movement with a martially stamped staccato will not be to everyone's taste, but it is to mine. Or that unless my ears are deceiving me he doubles some wind lines in the finale of the Ninth with violins, but I rather like that effect too. So I shall just have to fall back on saying that the leader is a bit too heart-on-sleeve in the coda of the first movement of the Fifth.
I really can't think of any other drawback these performances have. Their most conspicuous surface virtue is their dynamic range at the lower end of the spectrum. In the Largo of the Fifth Symphony Shostakovich divides the violins into three and the violas and cellos both into two sections. Partly to obtain rich string textures of course, but also, one realizes from Levi's reading, because he sometimes wants the expressive resource of a small group of strings playing really quietly, and the pianissimos achieved here are quite magical. Dynamics, indeed, are very carefully observed throughout, and it is this above all, without the need for any ostentatious acting, that gives such a troubled shadow to the middle section of the Ninth Symphony's second movement. Indeed, there are no applied expressive 'effects' in these readings: they have great emotional power, but it comes from a scrupulous gauging of what Shostakovich meant by a pp subito, an f where one would have expected an ff, and apparently puzzlingly isolated espr. markings (there are but two in that second movement of the Ninth Symphony, neither of them in an obvious place, but Levi knows where they are, and why).
In fact my listening notes on this pair of performances read like a catalogue of virtues: admirable brass playing (including a very Russian-sounding trumpet in the scherzo of the Ninth), a recording which never gives a harsh edge even to Shostakovich's highest-lying string lines, a most moving Largo in the Fifth, with a nobly built climax and a deathly pale dying away in the coda, a sensitively played bassoon solo in the Largo of the Ninth, splendidly controlled tempos throughout.... it would be fruitless to continue. These are performances of the very greatest distinction, backed by a recording of beautiful lucidity. I do urge you to hear them.'