This is Rostropovich’s third recording of the Fifth Symphony, and all of them are very similar in conception. His first, on DG, is the least well played. The second, on Teldec, is perhaps the finest, a touch more urgent in the outer movements than this newcomer, with the National Symphony of Washington, DC in better form, but the differences between that recording and this one are very marginal. Rostropovich’s conception remains as powerful as ever: a cogent first movement that rises to a huge climax, a scherzo with every drop of irony wrung from its very marrow, a nicely flowing largo of great expressive intensity, and a juggernaut of a finale with a masterfully built, falsely optimistic finale. All of these are firmly in place here, and happily the performance never drags, as did the Eleventh Symphony with these same forces.
The London Symphony Orchestra made an excellent recording of this work for RCA under Previn, and they still play it very well. The woodwinds sneer effectively in the scherzo, and the brass have plenty of the power necessary to sustain the painful dissonances in the finale’s coda. At times it seems to me that the strings could achieve a fuller, warmer sound, particularly in the largo, but this may be a function of the dry Barbican acoustic. That said, the engineers have done their job very well. In multi-channel playback this must be accounted one of the most successful productions from this source, with real three-dimensionality to the sound stage and no loss of impact or ensemble coherence. Given the fact that Rostropovich’s DG recording may be difficult to find and isn’t as good as this one, and the Teldec is now stuck in a box of the complete symphonies, this version earns an easy recommendation.
