Who is fit to judge
Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony? Is it banal and brutal and bombastic? So what? Are its themes trivial and its structures superficial? Does that really matter? Who can judge a work written by a man who had personally endured both the Great Terror of the '30s and the Great Patriotic War of the '40s and who wrote the Leningrad Symphony as a portrait of evil and a monument to suffering? No one can.
One can, however, judge a performance, and this one by
Dmitry Yablonsky and the
Russian Philharmonic Orchestra is brutal, bombastic, not especially well played, and often fairly painful. The raw attack of the brass playing above forte, the rough tone of the violins playing above the staff, and the sheer violence of the tympani at the climaxes are more suffering than one should have to bear.
Yablonsky's interpretation is more banal and bombastic than it needs to be in the outer movements and more restrained and reserved than it needs to be in the inner movements. Together,
Yablonsky and the
RPO do the Leningrad Symphony no justice. One can also judge recordings and this superaudio CD is amazingly real, incredibly immediate, and extremely loud.