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Posted by Martin Walker
on May 18, 2012, 3:44 pm, in reply to "Shostakovich - Petrenko"
82.249.3.157
I have to agree with Dan Morgan, too, though I have not heard this CD, for good reason: I bought the 10th some months ago after surveying a succession of adulatory reviews, above all in the British press - and found the performance well-recorded in a rather glaring, metallic way; you could hear more of the notes than on my other three recordings, but that was about it. The music, heavily and unimaginatively phrased, left me cold - and I began to feel the enormous Shostakovitch hype of recent years was just that - hype - and nothing more. To refresh my memory today I first put on the short but decisive 2nd movement "Stalin" allegro as performed by Mitropoulos with the NYPO (1954) - an unrelenting portrait of viciously destructive hysteria, one might say; poor sound - but unbearably exciting. Then I played the Petrenko, still as digitally hard though note-revealing as sound but interpretatively flat and undistinguished, followed by the Ancerl (1956), not much more impressive as a recording than Mitropoulos - but what a performance, like some monstrous (party?) machine crunching everything in its path. Finally I put on Mravinsky (1976), also not brilliant in terms of (No-Noised) recording quality, but an interpretation which draws you in to finally pound you inexorably to extinction. This takes nearly as long as Petrenko (the other two being rather faster), but the effect is quite different, being musically shaped as a whole.
I shan't be investing in any more of the Petrenko Naxos set, I must say.
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