Despite forsaking London for St Petersburg in mid-cycle, Vladimir Ashkenazy’s approach to Shostakovich remains impressively consistent. For all the gains in tonal weight and specificity, he remains the same discreet interpreter, reluctant to impose his own ideas to the extent of a Wigglesworth, let alone a Bernstein. As in his recent version of the Eleventh (5/96), Decca’s recording balance gives unusual prominence to timpani and percussion; this St Petersburg sound is altogether less ripe and alluring than that obtained by Temirkanov and/or his sound engineers. That may be no bad thing. And yet, Shostakovich’s rhetoric is not always empowered here with sufficient clout to banish niggling doubts about the music’s substance, doubts scarcely allayed by the tendentious, relentlessly anthropomorphizing booklet-notes. Ian Macdonald manages to imply that as late as 1964 the world-renowned and much-decorated composer was most widely known in the USSR as a formalist whose music, apart from some songs and festive pieces, was banned. This cannot be right so why repeat it?
The recording itself, made in the run up to concert performances commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, is preceded here by a radio broadcast made by the composer in the besieged city of 1941. Music, real music, will never be literally tied to a theme, and in his avoidance of the self-consciously profound, Ashkenazy seems almost too eager to let us make up our own minds. Brisk and efficient, his is not the most overwhelming of Leningrads, but it can be recommended as a secure base for further explorations.'