Simon Rattle's performance of the first movement of this symphony of the slowest I have ever heard, and by a substantial margin: he takes four minutes longer over it than Karajan on DG, and five-and-a-half minutes longer than Mitropoulos (who is, admittedly, very fast) on CBS. The reason for this is his choice of tempo for the first subject, an important choice since this melody returns (always with the same tempo marking) so often, and not only in the opening movement. That marking is crotchet = 96, and at each of its recurrences the music moves in crotchets, three of the bar, an unhurried but powerfully forward-moving tread that is as much part of the symphony's subject-matter as the melodic outline itself. Karajan, urgent from the outset, is a shade faster than 96, Previn on HMV is spot on, with a basic pulse firm enough to allow a degree of expressive rubato. Interestingly enough Mitropoulos, too, starts at precisely Shostakovich's marking, using it, though, as a springboard for an immense accelerando towards the movement's climax, while Mravinsky (on Saga) conducted the work's first performance and may have had the composer's sanction for a basic tempo slightly slower than the marking.
I find it very difficult, however, even to put a metronome figure to Rattle's tempo at this point. He phrases the opening with great care as a sequence of broodingly expressive sentences, with generous rubato and pauses filled with dark suspense, but with very little sense of purposeful impetus: those crotchets simply do not move. There is vehemence is plenty, but no real energy until the rather mannered arrival of the second subject (its first statement, by the flure, is breathy and tremulous—on the conductor's direction, presumably, since the flautist does not produce this sound elsewhere—and when the violins take it up they adopt a quite different phrasing). This combination, at a point where the very directionof the symphony is being established, of slow basic tempo, uncertainty of pulse and fussiness of detail (there are other examples of this later) robs the movement of momentum and its climax of bitterness and power.
Alas, it has an effect on the third movement as well. This begins finely, the awkward waltz melody given a sense of apprehensive expectancy by the pallor of its colouring and the hesitancy of its gait, but the return of the symphony's opening motive, still with its weak, slow pulse, disrupts both the complicated sequence of tempo changes at the movement's centre and the tense expressive ambiguities that they convey: the ensuing Largo, which should be slower still, scarcely seems so, the gradual picking up of speed begins too soon (the momentary lightening of mood at the passage marked semplice at fig. 121 thus goes almost unnoticed), and from then on Rattle often anticipates Shostakovich's accelerations and decelerations, sometimes by several pages. Although some passages in the latter part of the movement are taken very fast indeed, the overall timing is again conspicously long: 13'03'', against Karajan's 11'38'' and Mravinsky's 10'25''.
The ferocious scherzo and the vigorously athletic finale are much better (the sudden halt before the coda of the latter, a moment of drawn poignancy and unease, is especially effective), and there are many felicities of subtle phrasing and of fine orchestral playing (from the woodwind especially) throughout the work, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rattle has misjudged the most important interpretative decision that the symphony demands. The rather lean recording, too, starving the strings of body and presence in the outer movements, stands up poorly to comparison either with Karajan or with Previn. Both these superb performances; I have a marginal preference for the Previn because of his more relaxed way with the finale. The Mravinsky and Mitropoulos readings are both, in a sense, 'creator's' performances (Mitropoulos gave the first performance outside Russia); both are in mono, both are hugely urgent, but the Mravinsky is let down by a very ugly, distorted recording.'