This will be a self-recommending issue for many readers, given the unavailability of all three previous Kondrashin performances—a Moscow concert from November 1965 (Everest, 11/67), the belated Melodiya studio recording (HMV, 4/73) and a Bavarian Radio taping with John Shirley-Quirk which restored some censored lines of text (Philips, 4/82). Rival, Western accounts, like those of Previn (HMV, 4/81—nla) and Haitink, make a different sort of impact. More concerned with the symphonic than the dramatic, they bring a touch more subtlety to the ironic equivocations of ''A Career'' but are less successful in putting across the straightforward, 'dissident' anger of previous movements. Like early Western commentators they remain at one remove from the emotional life of the piece. Shostakovich confounds expectations not merely by selecting these vivid, dissenting verses (imagine Copland setting Bob Dylan c. 1963) but by presenting them in an idiom of Mussorgskian simplicity, unimpeachably 'correct' from the official Soviet point of view. It is no accident that the composer follows the Twelfth's revolutionary Dawn of Humanity with a consecutive opus focusing on the enduring legacy of Stalinism. On Russian Disc's rediscovered (stereo) tape, the finer points are forgotten as every syllable of text is projected with maximum force.
For anyone unconvinced by Haitink's monolithic conception—for all his technical assurance, he can seem to be missing the point—this new disc is the one to have, whatever its exact provenance. The choral singing is outstanding and, in place of Marius Rintzler's impassive manner (and occasional habit of sliding up to the note), we have Vitaly Gromadsky, risking more than critical disfavour by taking on this controversial new work, supremely committed (if not without moments of uncertain pitch), gloriously, unmistakably Russian. He does miss a vital cue in the desolate third movement, ''In the store'', here taken at an easy, flowing pace. As for the sound-quality, it is vivid enough, by no means impossibly crude, although the vocal image can 'bleed' across the soundstage and there are some worrying drop-outs five minutes into ''Babiy Yar''. Even if the booklet's claim that we are eavesdropping on the premiere is not supported by the recording details on the inlay, this is an indispensable piece of musical history. And, unlike the audience, we are given the poems.'