If you get the opportunity to sample this disc, you may be able to make up your mind about it within the opening bars. From the start the music is effectively re-imagined, purged of superfluous rhetoric and purely incidental local colour. Either that, or what we have here is Shostakovich denatured diminished, over-sweetened with excessive vibrato from thin-toned strings. Only the superb naturalness of the recording is not in doubt. The score's quieter pages are lent a rare luminosity, while Denon's huge dynamic range ensures that climaxes register impressively despite Inbal's reluctance to imperil beauty of sound with the kind of lacerating articulation the content might be thought to require.
Throughout the first movement, the playing is uncommonly distinguished. The Vienna Symphony may not produce a 'fat' sonority but everything gleams, with textures always carefully elucidated for the microphones (and some unfortunate vocalizing also caught). The cor anglais soloist sounds nervous at one point but recovers. It is the subsequent movements that go less well. Certainly, neither scherzo is ideally crisp. Lacking drive and motivation, Inbal simply glides over the surface of the first, while the second almost qualifies as limp, denied the rhythmic lift of Previn (HMV, 10/73—nla) or the weightier thrust of Kondrashin. No doubt the generous acoustic is partly to blame. Inbal's Largo breathes a warm, consolatory air, quite remote from Sanderling's claustrophobic torpor. Whether by accident or design, his finale sounds bitty and evasive. Like the performance as a whole, it's often very beautiful but it adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The soft-grained approach makes desolation exquisite, not least in the barely audible final pages of oscillating Cs and Ds, never more hushed or dreamlike. In the muted violin solo which winds into the section, Inbal departs from recent recording practice by replicating the smoothly ascending line of Previn and Haitink, an aberrant reading (two bars before fig. 172) to be found in certain editions of the score.
It may be that the inner torment, the solitude the outrage in this music are better conveyed by Sanderling—of recent hi-tech versions, Ashkenazy's offers a safe, direct view, taped with absolute fidelity in a sonically unglamorous hall—but Inbal's morendo is a thing of wonder. Others may be more 'authentic', Inbal has an innocence and integrity very much his own.'