Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 is not his longest, it just sounds like it is. The music is more suited to a movie score than a symphony, with long (long!) stretches of stillness in the first movement and tiresomely repeated, melodically inert battle music in the second. The third movement, however, does offer genuine emotion, while the bombastic finale concludes the work quite effectively.
Successfully realizing this piece requires inspired conducting, edge-of-the-seat playing, and for recordings, demonstration-quality sound. The present disc does not meet these requirements. The main problem is the TSO Live recording, which sounds as if made for broadcast, and suffers from the dynamic limitation endemic to such productions. This robs many passages, and especially the climaxes, of their sonic impact. And in music like this sonic impact is pretty much all it has going for it.
Conductor Peter Oundjian’s tempos sound to be uniformly slow, but a check of the timings reveals that his is not the slowest of performances, indicating a lack of energetic impulse. The finale is most telling: Oundjian takes it at a reasonably quick pace, but the lack of urgency in the Toronto Symphony’s otherwise fine playing gives the impression of too much space between the notes.
Listen to Berglund or Stokowski, still the two finest performances, and you’ll hear the excitement missing from Oundjian. Haitink’s version, with top-notch playing by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and a spacious, high-impact Decca recording also compels your consideration. No doubt Oundjian’s reading made for a fine Toronto Symphony concert evening, and this recording best serves as a memento for the attendees.
