Neeme Järvi has given thought-provoking accounts of Shostakovich’s symphonies Nos. 11, 12, and 13 with the Gothenburg Symphony. He now turns to Symphony No. 2 (“To October”) and No. 3 (“The First of May”), together with the 1931 suite from the ballet The Bolt. In the two symphonies (crudely bombastic affairs that seem retrograde after the ground-breaking First) Shostakovich tried to reconcile what he termed “abstract experimentalism” by using patriotic choral finales, whose stridently propagandist tone necessitated direct, unambiguous treatment, a fact not overlooked by Järvi. He knows just how to evince their revolutionary clamour to the full without letting the music degenerate into stale rhetoric.
In Symphony No. 2, Järvi is especially adept at making the four tableaux (depicting the redemption of the people from the oppression of poverty and privation under Lenin?) hang together in a work that easily can become disjunctive and fragmentary. The 13-part fugue before the chorus enters is menacingly acrid. It holds no terrors for the skilled Gothenburg orchestra, but this performance’s choral finale (ushered in by a factory whistle), a brief but brazen affirmation of Soviet ideology, doesn’t quite manage to clinch the work as successfully as Bernard Haitink in his London Philharmonic Orchestra recording for Decca.
Rostropovich’s Teldec coupling with the London Symphony also brings a powerful reading of The First of May, but both Järvi and especially Haitink offer a more convincing view of the dream-like sequences of the slow movement and provide even more raucously patriotic finales. The suite from The Bolt is astutely handled by Järvi, and along with orchestral playing of consistently high order throughout, these new DG recordings are generally superior to Rostropovich’s, with more clarity in lower registers and better choral definition. But neither performance equals Haitink’s, part of the first-ever complete cycle of Shostakovich symphonies to be recorded in the West. The 1981 performances were among the most vividly spectacular of Decca’s early digital productions, and still sound as brilliant as ever.
