I was astonished at the low level of the Teldec recording. In searching for the ideal volume setting I had to turn the dial from its customary ten o'clock to some way past 12 o'clock. Once there the sound was fine, with the minor exception of some rather thudding timpani.
The other thing that astonished me was Rostropovich's view of the first movement. This proceeds with only the merest acknowledgement of the notated changes of tempo. Slowish performances I've heard, fastish ones too, and ones with wide tempo fluctuations, but never one as uniformly steady as this. A musician of Rostropovich's calibre doesn't take such a decision lightly of course, and there are many incidental gains. Protracted though the movement becomes it carries far more conviction than Maxim Shostakovich's Collins Classics recording with the same orchestra.
So despite such lapses as the gross slowing in the second subject recapitulation (18'45''–18'50'') I was resolved to give the movement another try—that is until the badly mistuned piccolos in the coda (from 24'20''). I hate to point the finger at individuals, but this is a crucial passage and only a performance of compelling greatness could persuade me to listen through such a serious (and surely remediable) distortion.
Problems of woodwind intonation resurface in the finale introduction, and in the recapitulation of this movement the bassoon statement of the main theme takes two wrong turnings (A for G sharp at 10'57'', G for F sharp at 11'03''). In the meantime the scherzo has a definite feeling of driving with the handbrake on, and much of the good work in the third movement is ruined by a premature slowing at 10'32'' (halfway between figs. 137 and 138). These are just a few symptoms of an interpretation possibly on the way to great things but as yet only half formed. For a modern recording I incline towards the Halle and Skrowaczewski (Pickwick), an interpretation only matched by the more tricksily recorded Rozhdestvensky (on Olympia, generously coupled with the Hamlet Suite) and outshone only by the similarly mid-priced 1967 Karajan on DG.'