Hitler’s
attack on Russia and the consequent Soviet shift of allegiance
towards the British-American axis meant that competition became
hot for the first western performances of Shostakovich’s great
symphonic fresco the “Leningrad” Symphony, his seventh. Sir
Henry Wood was first off the mark with a BBC broadcast only
three months after the Russian première, which had been conducted
by Samuel Samosud on 5 March 1942. A week after the broadcast,
Wood gave the first western concert performance. Then, on 19
July, Arturo Toscanini gave the first American broadcast.
The
surviving recording shows that Toscanini managed to conceal
his lack of sympathy with the musical idiom, but he never conducted
the work again and declined to give the western première of
no. 8 without even seeing the score. This new work had been
completed on 9 September 1943 and had its first performance
in Moscow, under Mravinsky, less than two months later. The
honour fell to Artur Rodzinski to unveil the symphony to the
west at the Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony
Orchestra on 2 April 1944. He repeated it later the same year
in the performance preserved on this disc. The sound is remarkably
clean and clear for the date. The dynamic range is obviously
limited, the quality a little shallow with some shellac hiss,
but quite frankly I wouldn’t expect a studio recording from
the same time to sound any better.
Mravinsky’s
several recordings, some in fairly recent sound, obviously have
a very special authority. Rodzinski, however, yielded to no
one in his understanding of the music. No less a martinet than
Mravinsky himself, he sees that the long, mainly slow, first
movement has a suppressed tension, rather than the sense of
doleful meditation which more recent western conductors such
as Haitink and Previn have found in it. Like Mravinsky, he dares
the woodwind to push their tone to within a millimetre of overblowing.
When the explosion comes it is a fearful one.
The
savageries, drolleries and violence of the next two movements
are resolved with whiplash attack while the ambiguous nature
of the final passacaglia is realized with great insight. The
pessimistic tone of the symphony won it few favours at the time,
on either side of the Atlantic. Even in 1967 Robert Layton could
write that “it is not a work in which the composer evinces complete
mastery of his material”. Another decade and a reappraisal of
Mahler had to intervene before it came to be seen as one of
Shostakovich’s most searching masterpieces. Sometimes a new
work falters because of poor initial performances. We can hear
that Rodzinski’s advocacy and understanding left nothing to
be desired.
A
disc for connoisseurs and specialists, I suppose, but Rodzinki’s
art deserves investigation and the present production is as
good a place to start as any. Robert Matthew-Walker’s excellent
essay provided me with the information for my introductory paragraphs.
Christopher
Howell
Philharmonic-Symphony
Orchestra of New York/Artur Rodzinski
