Jarvi directs a characteristically warm and urgent performance of this exuberant inspiration of the 24-year-old composer. It is by far the longest symphony that Dvorak ever wrote, and was longer still in its original form, before the composer revised it. As Ray Minshull put it, when commenting on the Kertesz/LSO issue, which he had produced for Decca, Dvorak ''later learnt to be jubilant more concisely''. The jubilation is what matters, and there is plenty of that on this record yet the issue brings my first significant disappointment in Jarvi's Dvorak series. Whether in part the fault of the young composer's instrumentation, here is an instance where the Chandos preference for a warm, reverberant acoustic has brought with it too much muddle. Compare this with the 20-year-old Kertesz version at almost any point, and not only is the detail strikingly clearer, the light and shade in texture and tension are much more sharply presented. The whole interpretation, with more spacious speeds, has more room to breathe. The arguments, which run the risk of being diffuse anyway, need that clarity which, incidentally establishes the Czech flavour of the idiom the more tellingly. With an overlay of reverberation such as you get on the Chandos disc, everything is smoothed over. Even the folky opening of the main Allegro of the first movement, entering gently after the build-up of the brief introduction might easily be missed, when its details are clouded, as here.
Even with this serious shortcoming, there is much to enjoy in a richly inventive score, one which always leaves me amazed that it took almost 100 years to publish, let alone get in the repertory. The washiness of the recording of the symphony becomes all the more apparent, when as a generous fill-up after that 48-minute work the Slavonic Rhapsody No. 3 is added. That is given a delicious performance with its popular Slavonic dance ideas treated with bubbling humour, helped by sound far clearer and more detailed, which is back to Chandos's normal high standard. It brings it out just how crucial microphone placing is in a reverberant acoustic. I note that the venue given is the Henry Wood Hall, Glasgow, the same for both symphony and rhapsody, but a different day can produce astonishingly different results.'