Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony (perhaps we should stop calling it Leningrad; the composer himself withdrew the title) used to be the one his admirers preferred not to talk about, largely because of the supposed vulgarity and crude pictorialism of the notorious juggernaut-crescendo in the first movement. If the symphony is now recognized as one of Shostakovich's finest works, far deeper and more complex than was once realized and with that crescendo serving far more than a blatantly programmatic purpose, it must have been Berglund's sober, craggy and profoundly earnest performance that changed a lot of minds. It is good to have it on CD, particularly since Haitink's Decca reading is inseparably coupled in that medium with the Twelfth Symphony, which you may not want or may already have. Berglund's recording is a bit older than Haitink's, and this shows in some of the massive tuttis, where the recording reaches its limit before the music does: Decca's recording for Haitink demonstrates just how much gradation of colour and texture there can be within a page marked fff throughout.
Haitink's is an even better performance than Berglund's, too, especially in the noble slow movement, whose passionate intensity is profoundly moving, and in some of the huge outbursts of the outer movements, which are overwhelmingly powerful (the recording markedly helps here, of course). Haitink also adds about six and a half minutes to Berglund's timing for the symphony; not usually by adopting greatly slower speeds, but by flexiby adapting to changes of mood. Berglund is bound to seem a bit under-characterized by comparison, especially since he sometimes understates Shostakovich's markings, but his account has its own virtues, a sense of brooding grimness among them, and it is still worth considering for any collector wanting the Seventh Symphony, on its own, in a performance that is fully aware of its stature.'