Symphony No. 7 in C major, Leningrad, opus 60.
Kurt Masur, New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
Teldec 3984-21467-2. DDD. TT 74:44.
Recorded live Avery Fisher Hall, New York, May 1998.

Kurt Masur directs a live Leningrad symphony that would win a warmer welcome were the existing niches not already occupied by superior competitors. Some of Masur's interpretative tweaks sit well, such as the premature accelerando from Fig. 121-4/7:41 of the third movement, but most, like the unmarked ritardando around Fig. 131/10:00, seem arbitrary, dissipating momentum and dramatic tension. Wigglesworth's BIS account (CD-873), reviewed in DSCH No. 10, is crammed with far more - and more persuasive - revisionism than is on offer here.

The symphony's dramatic line remains just shy of taut even where Masur plays things straight. Most critically for me, the wind up to those triumphant bars following Fig. 204/15:31 in the finale needs to be cranked an extra half-turn to trigger the shiver that usually spreads from the back of my neck at that juncture. This sensation Valery Polyansky and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra deliver in their introspective testimony on Chandos (CHAN 9621; see DSCH No. 10).

The Teldec performance does have its good qualities: solid accuracy on the part of all musicians, notably the brass, plus ravishing beauty of tone in, for instance, the wistful opening statements of the third movement. If anything, the players make their job seem too effortless, for I found myself wishing perversely for a little more of the strain that the St. Petersburg Philharmonic - with authentic raspberry-blowing horns - reveal in Vladimir Ashkenazy's rather rough and ready submission on Decca (448 814-2). Still, one cannot but admire the virtuosity on display in the new entry.

That said, listening to the present release reinforces the impression left on me when I attended one of the concerts at which it was taped: the New York Philharmonic play like a collection of fine soloists rather than as a truly cohesive instrument. Matters are not aided by the recording's up-front vantage point. Though Teldec's mixing of their many microphones is characteristically skilful, exposing cleanly all internal detail, the individual instruments are unnaturally spotlit. The result is rather like watching arts-video coverage of a classical concert, with the camera focussing in closely on whichever player has control of the melodic ball. A most regrettable exception is that the closing timpani sound distant and fail to pack the visceral wallop one expects.

Close miking also results in the faithful reporting of every shuffle and squeak from the stage; during some quiet passages, stage noises blend into something resembling analogue hiss. Neither have the engineers managed to spare the home listener from the inconsiderate New York audience whose fidgeting so vexed me during the live concert. Their coughs obscure the solo winds in their denouement to the first movement's climax.

Ashkenazy's Leningrad derives from sessions on 5 and 6 May 1995, immediately preceding a concert in the eponymous city commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War. Winds of history that bypass Masur's urbane account scour Ashkenazy's reading, quite independently of the 1941 radio address that the composer broadcast to his countrymen, with which Decca precede the symphony. The St. Petersburg players understand, in their marrow, what is at stake here.

This is not to say that an outsider's report is necessarily unreliable. Something epic gelled in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 1989 performance of Symphony No. 7 under Leonard Bernstein (Deutsche Grammophon 427 632-2; coupled with Symphony No. 1). We don't discuss it much these days, but this 2-disc set remains available - and eminently recommendable. Bernstein tells a riveting story in which one can immerse oneself completely, and his idiosyncratic adjustments surprise rather than offend. Anyone seeking an all-digital Leningrad will be better served by he, Wigglesworth, Polyansky or Ashkenazy than by Masur.

W. Mark Roberts
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