Reference Recordings: Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony

I was in the audience for the First Symphony the week before. Was stunning and ran to the box office at the end of the concert to get tix for the Leningrad — the power & placement of the additional brass around Symphony Hall made the effect astounding.

An amazing recording, it gave me the sense that this is how the Leningrad symphony should be done.

I saw Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic around that time, I think it was 1988. They played Mahler 6. And just like at the Shostakovich concert you talk about, he was 20 or 25 minutes late. The friend I went with was convinced he'd been on the whiskey.

A shame that Bernstein did not perform with the Chicago Symphony a good deal more. The chemistry between them is all too evident in this stupendous live recording. I remember hearing it broadcasted live courtesy of WQXR and what a sense of occasion it was: the thunderous applause at the end encapsulated that unforgettably.

Bernstein knew the CSO had no limits. He wanted to do more with them, but it wasn't meant to be.

Bernstein himself said this was, of all the recordings he made, his personal favorite.

I heard Berglund do it live in Bournemouth. Staggering.

Perhaps it's unintended, but it is appropriate that this review is posted on May 9th, Victory Day in Russia, celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. The symphony was famously performed in the Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1942 during the Nazi siege of that city, by a makeshift ensemble of starving musicians, and it was broadcast by loudspeaker throughout the city in defiance of the Germans. I'm sure most of Dave's audience is aware of this but I thought it worth mentioning, as there are few pieces of classical music with more historical significance.

Great recording. Unique circumstances!

I have a vivid memory of this symphony being performed by Gennadi Rozhdestvenshy and a Soviet Orchestra with a long name around 1990, at the National Auditorium in Madrid. I was seated in the choir stalls behind the orchestra and watching the conductor face on. During the invasion theme and variations, by the fourth variation or so I was in tears, nearly levitating while Doc from the Seven Dwarfs was directing the musicians with his eyes. Entering a trance is not something that happens often, but when it does it's really worth it. In the second movement, the guy on my left started scratching himself in a random though relentless sequence: left eyebrow, right shoulder, left elbow, ribcage, left knee, vicinity of the scrotum, and then back up again and, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say, And so on. My brain lit up, I took out my ticket and wrote in capital letters: ¿TIENE USTED PULGAS? (HAVE YOU GOT FLEAS?) and handed it to him. He was really pissed off, got up, jumped over me and the two people to my right and sat in a seat that was free. Maybe it was a nervous disorder of sorts (OCD?). Anyway, a few months later we coincided at a cycle of Shostakovich string quartets. We didn't say anything, but we obviously both get our kicks with good ol' Dmitri.

CSO low brass section at the end of the finale: "Nothing is louder than us." Bud Herseth: "Hold my beer."

I can never quite forget Ernest Newman's comment that if you want to find the position of the Seventh Symphony on a musical map, you should look on the seventieth degree of longitude and the last degree of platitude!

That recording is so much fun! In high school mine was Bernstein/NYPO. The only recording I didn't like was a Czech orchestra, but that was technical sound problems.

I saw the National Symphony Orchestra perform the seventh in 1998, when Slatkin was director. He also took certain parts of the first movement, namely the bassoon section, which threw me off, because I had only heard recordings of it up to that point. Years later, I saw the Marinsky with Gergiyev perform the piece complete with the bassoon. Personally, I prefer the longer parts of the symphony, because it provides the element of the foreboding Shostakovich was under when he composed it.

Just bought the Bernstein cd on Amazon. There’s also a nice Bernstein 6CD-set featuring both Stravinsky and Shostakovich …

This is my favorite recording of the seventh, just wish the 1st movement was not so long. I think he overcompensated from his previous recording with the cuts.

I've been lucky enough to hold and read a 1st edition of the score published in Leningrad with Shostakovich's autograph on the title page. It took a little while to realise what I was holding but the penny dropped eventually. What struck me was the thin crappy paper it was published on. It is not surprizing considering it was printed in war-time Leningrad. So yeah, I have a big soft spot for the 7th and have Janson's recording of it.

There can be none other.

Yay, more Shosty posting! I'm on a huge Shosty binge right now so love these (please, string quartets next? :D ). This is one of my least favorite Shosties - but still a fave. Neeme Järvi's super quick reading is the way to go for me, though this Lenny's ending is unlike anything else I've heard. I just picked up the 1946 Celi (from before Celi went into his super slow mode IIRC) 2nd hand. Is Celi in earlier recordings any good? I can't seem to stand him except in Bruckner occasionally.

I learned the 7th from Bernstein's NYP recording, so I assumed his slow tempo for the first section (before the Bolero bit) was normal. Only later did I learn he was the outlier and most others are quite a lot faster. But I still love LB's expansiveness. That Columbia would probably have established itself as the reference, IMO, if it hadn't been for that darn variation cut in Mvt 1.