The Bruckner 9 recording certainly has those fierce moments, but after I had listened to Jochum and Karajan, Mravinsky's 'concept' is simply wrong- headed.
With regard to his Shostakovich, I admit I have become a devoted Kurt Sanderling view of the Shostakovich world. It is not as fierce - a word which comes to mind repeatedly when I listen to Mravinsky - apart from the magic of his recording of Dawn on the Moscow River - nor as fast as the Mravinsky traversal, but that in itself makes it more attractive to me because I believe Shostakovich meant way more than that. My best example of this is the opening movement of the glorious 15th Symphony. Mravinsky is a gallop through the China Shop, while all of the three recordings I have with Sanderling, the chaos of the gallop becomes poetry. By the way, the Berlin Phil performance of this - on the Berlin Phil Label - is in my view the best of the three.
It's interesting that you nominate Mravinsky's recording of the 12th, a work, like the 7th and the 11th, I have never come to terms with. Significantly, neither did Kurt Sanderling.
And with regard to the Sibelius 4, I recall doing a comparison with an old friend of mine, a man who learned his Sibelius from Beecham and his ilk. This man considered himself to be an expert on Sibelius, especially the 4th. I played the Maazel Vienna version first - blind, as it were, he had no idea who the conductors were. My friend said, Take it off, it's schmaltz, this music is glacial, it's cold, whoever is conducting makes it sound like Kol Nidrei. I replaced it with the Sanderling. My friend's face glowed, That's it, he roared, that's it, whoever this is understands Sibelius. The first one was a schmuck!
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