Rozhdestvensky's performance of the Fifteenth Symphony on JVC is an urgent and vivid one, let down by a distractingly fussy recording which continually focuses on single instruments; the upper woodwind and the celeste, especially, appear to have places reserved for them on the rostrum whenever they have solos to play, and the leader doesn't seem to be sitting anywhere near his colleagues in the first violin section. There are also some irritatingly odd noises in the finale—buzzy timpani and whooshy double-bass pizzicatos—due perhaps to unslackened snares on a nearby side-drum. Decca's recording for Haitink has none of these disfigurements; it is far more naturally balanced, with a satisfying sense of space that does not diminish the tremendous climax of the slow movement in the least. I also prefer Haitink's interpretation in a number of respects: there is more gravity and less histrionics to his slow movement; his allegretto in the finale is a bit slower and thus more poignant than Rozhdestvensky's; his LPO players are even finer than the often virtuoso Russians.
To clinch the matter Haitink offers half an hour's more music (Rozhdestvensky's version, with no fill-up at all, is rather poor value at 43 minutes), and it is music of great beauty and poignancy. Shostakovich's settings of Jewish folk poems seem to recognize a kinship between his ambiguity and that of Eastern European Jewish music: the grimly gay fiddle-tune of the ''Song of Poverty''; the dance music that heightens the grief of a couple doomed to a long, perhaps endless separation; the two juxtaposed and related lullabies, one lilting and carefree, the other darkly bitter, the lullaby of a mother distracted by the absence of her imprisoned husband—they all sound like folk-melodies, but all are pure and quintessential Shostakovich, and they are sung with moving eloquence.'