On the face of it the RCA coupling of the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto offers excellent value for money, though it seems strange that they should be issuing another version of the symphony so soon after their triumphant version with Sir Colin Davis and the LSO coupled with an altogether magisterial Sixth. Although he can be intrusively mannered Yuri Temirkanov gives a fairly straightforward and at times thrilling reading of the symphony. There are some idiosyncratic touches in the trio section of the scherzo but on the whole I was carried by this reading. The St Petersburg Philharmonic certainly play with full-blooded conviction and obvious enjoyment. The recording, too, has warmth though the timpani are too prominent and reverberant both here and in the Violin Concerto. Vladimir Spivakov is perhaps too close to the microphone in the latter, but there is nothing bland or narcissistic about his playing. He could have made more of the echo four bars before fig. 1 in the slow movement (track 2, 2'32'') marked piano and pianissimo but here a generalized mezzo-forte though on the whole there are few quibbles to make and much panache to admire. All the same, for all its merits, the performance does not resonate in the memory afterwards in the way that the great recordings of this piece do from Neveu, Heifetz and Oistrakh down to Chung and Lin.'