Leonard Bernstein was an ardent but curiously selective advocate of the music of Shostakovich. Apparently approved of by the composer, he was none the less apt to disparage his work—to the extent of championing the Fourteenth as a rare peak of achievement in an otherwise unbroken slide into mediocrity. The pot calling the kettle black? Perhaps. Bernstein recorded the piece in conjunction with concert performances at the end of 1976, and his interpretation can seem a slightly muted affair. At Avery Fisher Hall for The New Yorker, Andrew Porter for one was unconvinced: ''If one averts one's eyes, one hears something less extraordinary than the performance he mimes''. Don't expect the white-hot intensity of the Moscow premiere under Barshai (now available on Russian Disc); instead, the singing is firm, perhaps a shade featureless, the playing amply committed. It would be wrong to exaggerate the deficiencies. Where recent Western rivals let the music sag to breaking point, Bernstein is benumbed, never becalmed, and Sony's engineers have done wonders with the analogue tape. One small black mark: the Russian texts are presented here in intractable Cyrillic script, though translations are provided.
There may have been extra-musical considerations behind Bernstein's enthusiasm for the Leningrad Symphony at a time of East-West tension. Outside the Soviet bloc, the work had more or less dropped out of the repertoire so this 1962 recording has obvious historical interest even if it cannot compete sonically with the much-acclaimed DG digital remake. Curiously, the Gramophone of December 1965 was aghast at the slowness as well as the supposed sentimentality of Bernstein's approach. In fact the playing time looks short today—something only partly explained by an uncharacteristic cut excising the fourth statement of the Bolero-like invasion theme from the first-movement 'development'. One hesitates to think what invective might have been provoked by the Chicago version, but there is no doubt that the later performance is worth the extra outlay, subtler in feeling thanks in part to its much wider dynamic range.
Bernstein's 1959 studio recording of the Fifth is altogether better known, even if its merits have been hotly contested over the years. Taped in Boston some weeks after the orchestra's return from a triumphant Soviet tour, this must be substantially the rendition which moved its composer to tears, combining hi-tech brilliance with a declamatory power and hectoring zeal more usually associated with the Russian tradition. Bernstein sought to recreate it more than once on his London visits and I was struck then as now by the contrast with Andre Previn's less driven but perhaps more natural conception of the score (RCA, 5/66—nla). While both Americans favour a slow Largo and a finale which retains a welcome element of the traditional display-piece the results could not be more different. Bernstein's coupling, as in a previous CBS incarnation, is the Ninth, a fair rather than outstanding account with some flat-pitched trombone interjections in the first movement.
The Sixth has come up very well in the remastering but it too fails to plumb the depths. The first movement is not quite as dark as it should be despite much careful phrasing—again, a plainer, less moulded, less 'public' style can pay dividends in this music—and the second is already taken at a relatively steady pace, easing the transition to the finale's presto clowning. In the First Symphony, the transfer engineers have not been able to eradicate the thoroughly nasty, early-1970s, echt CBS boxiness of sound. Even so, Bernstein's way with the music is worth sampling—as thrilling and dangerous, as it would be later in Chicago. Efrem Kurtz's fresh, unruffled balleticism is left behind in favour of neurotic instability in the scherzo and all-out melodrama in the third and fourth movements. There is some crude, ill-tuned brass and an odd electronic fault (2'02'' into track 4).
Finally in this batch comes a not very logical recoupling of the Shostakovich piano concertos, Bernstein famously directing from the keyboard in the Second. This is the oldest recording in the group and dates from January 1958. Bernstein the conductor accompanies Previn the pianist rather less carefully in No. 1—the piano tone is poorer too—yet there is again that elusive, reanimating sense of live music-making forged in studio conditions. It's probably there in the Poulenc, although, it must be said, Gallic insouciance was never Bernstein's strong point.'