Haitink and Mravinsky (on Decca and Philips respectively) have set such high benchmarks for recordings of this symphony that only an exceptional reading or one that presents the work in a valid new light can hope to compete. Jarvi comes close at times, with an account of the first movement that subjugates massive density of sound to the sheer dissonance-quotient of its most crucial pages. It is occasionally a quite piercingly bright sound that he produces: no weakness of the recording, which elsewhere renders the expressive graininess of the lower strings very well, but an interpretative decision to stress the biting conflicts of the movement. His speeds are excellently judged, too, with gravity never declining into lethargy in the long slow introduction, and with a fiercely energetic allegro that is nevertheless never too fast for incidents to register with maximum force. The two scherzos, too, have power as well as febrile energy.
So far so good, though I was worried by Jarvi's failure to do very much with those violin passages m the opening movement that Shostakovich asked to be given the paler, thinner colouring that comes from playing with the bow close to the finger-board. This under-characterization, however, seems to me much more serious in the passacaglia, where the composer's repeated demands for expressive playing (at one point he writes espress. three times in six bars) disturb Jarvi's earnest sobriety hardly a jot. Subdued poignancy is certainly an option in this music (Haitink chooses it, and the result is moving) but Jarvi gets close to impassivity, and the sudden pang that should strike in the coda fails to do so. His account of the finale is perplexing: greyish, rather mechanistic in the faster pages and again almost dispassionate. Numb, even, and perhaps that is his intention, but there is a world of uneasy emotion in this music that his reading seems to turn away from.
Slatkin's account is carefully balanced, well played and thoughtfully paced: praiseworthy virtues, but hardly exciting ones, and indeed his passacaglia is not so much sober as dull, his account of that first savage scherzo approaches geniality in its impactless refusal to play a true staccato. Gently expressive pages go well; those needing eloquence, feverishness or urgency are under-stated. A brightish sound again, but this time it is the recording, which adds a touch of sourness to the high strings (and the side drum, irritatingly enough, is wheeled forward into the midst of the violins at one point in the first movement). Rozhdestvensky's much more vehement reading on Olympia/Conifer is let down by a shriller recording still, so it remains a choice between Mravinsky (burningly eloquent, with appalling power) and Haitink (more nobly restrained, and superlatively played and recorded).'