The great achievement of Haitink's performance of the Leningrad Symphony is that it redefines the sense in which it is a programme symphony at all. I was very enthusiastic about his reading when it first appeared on LP but not enthusiastic enough; repeated hearings have now convinced me, about the work itself. Its centre of gravity, Haitink eloquently demonstrates, is the grandly tragic Adagio, a passionate threnody and one of Shostakovich's very finest slow movements; it is the source of the nobility that seems to be crushed beneath victorious feet in the disquieting finale; it is the fruit of the conflict set up by the notorious ostinato in the first movement. Indeed, Haitink also compellingly demonstrates that the opening movement is a sonata allegro, not an exposition and a recapitulation separated by a quarter of an hour of brutal, motiveless uproar. We are left in no doubt that the determined, sweeping and long-spanned initial idea is a true 'first subject', containing within it the seeds, not only of the ostinato itself and of the poignant Adagio towards the end of the movement (a passage of which Shostakovich said simply ''I do not even know how to describe this music'') but of that great Largo as well. Because of the poignant and dramatic circumstances of its composition, the work began as a 'Leningrad' Symphony; it became (Shostakovich gave it no title and suppressed the descriptive headings he had originally planned for each movement) his Symphony No. 7 in (far more often anxiously out of) C major, and it has never seemed more symphonic than in this superb reading.
Haitink's account of the (one now realizes) far more problematic Twelfth Symphony is no less magisterial, no less responsive to the huge range of sonority that the score demands. Here the massive string force takes on a rather aggressive glare in some of the more strenuous tuttis, but there is no such flaw in the magnificent Seventh; how can we ever have doubted, this performance asks, that it is a masterpiece?'