Jarvi's is the fastest Shostakovich No. 11 for a long while. He is only five minutes within the published score's suggested hour, mark you, but Rozhdestvensky's far from somnolent account on Olympia/Target takes five minutes over the hour, while DePreist's reading on Delos is three minutes slower still. Jarvi's speeds are in fact often quite close to Shostakovich's occasionally perplexing metronome marks, as though he were trying to make the piece work without exaggeratedly departing from the letter of the score. If you go through the tedious but sometimes salutary process of counting the metrical units in a movement and multiplying them by the tempo indications, you will arrive, in the case of the opening Adagio (''The Palace Square''), for example, at a duration much closer to Jarvi's 13 minutes plus, than to the 18 minutes of DePreist or Rozhdestvensky. And Jarvi's swifter tempo does not diminish the music's suspense or make it sound hurried. What it does seem to do, however, is rob him of elbow room for the sort of dramatization that makes the work, in both DePreist's and Rozhdestvensky's hands, seem bigger and of deeper moment than one might have suspected. The numbness of the very opening, the between-clenched-teeth bitterness later on, are both less apparent than in the other two recordings, especially DePreist.
The lack is even more noticeable in the second movement (''January 9th'') where the climax is vividly machine-like but not frighteningly awesome, as is certainly the case in Rozhdestvensky's and DePreist's hands, and in the third (''In Memoriam''), where the tempo Jarvi sets at the outset, is a bit faster than the composer's marking, the result is doubly injurious: the lamenting string theme has no space to swell into grave poignancy, and the central outburst (marked ''a little faster'') is simply too hurried to discharge its burden. Rozhdestvensky has similiar problems here; DePreist, by taking his time, makes the outburst deeply moving and fills the grim denunciation that follows it with dignity as well as bitter eloquence.
The centre of the finale (''Tocsin'') is crucial. The return of the recurrent adagio, both a concluding (and a most poignant) lament and a trigger for the huge minatory gestures of the coda, is taken by Jarvi at precisely the marked tempo but almost impassively, as though the cor anglais solo were simply another, now nostalgic, reference to a theme we have heard rather often before (and although his reading of this movement is a minute or so shorter than Rozhdestvensky's and two minutes shorter than DePreist's, we are rather more aware of just how often we've heard it). DePreist, at an extremely slow tempo, makes this the very centre and destination of the work, an achingly sad and beautiful threnody to which the coda is a bitter but also a pitiful response.
There's fine orchestral playing, mark you, and a decent recording; though even here Delos's spacious acoustic is in a class of its own. In a word DePreist is exceptional, Rozhdestvensky is very good indeed but Jarvi, to my regret and surprise, well-meaningly misconceived.'