Yoel Levi's Shostakovich cycle has been well received in these pages and this latest instalment has many fine qualities. Why then did it leave me unmoved? The guilty party is, I suspect, Kurt Sanderling, whose similarly long-breathed reading—see below—has come to seem even more impressive on repeated listening. With him there is a greater sense of line, not to mention authenticity of experience in the long opening movement, even if he departs yet more radically from the pressurized Soviet performance tradition upheld by former colleagues like Evgeni Mravinsky. Levi's slowness here never conveys the same sense of desolation and passages like the long cor anglais solo seem merely long-winded. The playing is excellent, but you may notice that the grotesque march-like parody of lyrical material which builds to the harrowing central climax (16'31'' ff) is not quite securely earthed, the timpanist less than rock-steady.
The scherzos, while effective enough, are neither as menacingly heavy-footed as Sanderling's nor as rhythmically alert as Previn's (HMV, 10/73 and too long unavailable). To be fair, Levi does elicit a very Russian-sounding trumpet solo in the second of them where Sanderling's Berlin Symphony Orchestra is technically ragged. To my ears though the Largo again verges on the bland, lacking either Ashkenazy's 'safer' fluidity of movement or Sanderling's formidable concentration. The older conductor really does bring out the extraordinary bleakness of this music and his sense of identification with the underlying issues is palpable; Levi's sounds like a good (albeit soft-grained) realization of an abstract text.The finale calls for a lighter touch and here the Atlanta forces come into their own, although I remained unconvinced by their conductor's occasional tendency to exaggerate string articulation at the expense of overall coherence. The documentation is good and the performance conscientious. Even so, this does not strike me as a greatly original account. There is a fine occidental sheen to the sound, but also some lack of depth: the upper strings can sound thin and the winds inevitably lack the character and tonal specificity of their Soviet bloc rivals. Having reset the volume control to compensate for low-level mastering, I still found the results too cool and perhaps too beautiful to be wholly satisfying.'