I quite concur with your assessment of Szell's Bruckner 3 and 8, his Mahler 4, and his Brahms symphonies. I was gonna, as we say in Australia, mention them meself, but I was already rambling on enough: basta e basta!!!!
I might have agreed with you, Marc, about Szell's temperamental unsuitability for Bruckner until I came across this:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2018/Apr/Bruckner_Szell_SB2K53519.htm
There is also a fine Mahler 4 with the Cleveland and I enjoy his complete Brahms symphonies with the same orchestra very much more than I would have predicted.
I think of Mravinsky as the Russian Szell (with whom he has much in common as a conductor). Would I ever turn to Szell for Bruckner? No. Mahler? No. Brahms? Unlikely.
I do get what you are saying are about Mravinsky. I have over 20 CDs of rehearsals from him and they really are very uninspiring and torturous to get through (not unlike Karl Böhm rehearsals, in fact). Although the Beecham approach doesn't always work - play the whole work through and pick out a couple of rough spots - neither does the fractured pick up of every undotted crotchet and incorrect bowing or whatever either. Mravinsky performances couldn't possibly sound that different if he was playing Tchaikovsky's Sixth hundreds of times. (Oddly, with a conductor like Takashi Asahina who had a very narrow repertoire you hardly ever got the same performance - his Bruckner is in no way a copy of a copy.)
'Does Mravinsky understand Shostakovich?'. Yes he does Dieter. What you mean is you don't like it, which is perfectly fair. What I will say is that it not the Holy Grail of Shostakovich performance. I have been listening to all the known performances of the Twelfth Symphony on disc for an article and Mravinsky is by no means the touchstone in this work. Is his approach to the symphony even right, for example? Are there better ones? You can argue this with the Tenth Symphony as well (in fact, I would rate Karajan's live performances of the Tenth, especially his Dresden one, every bit as fine).
I don't feel quite so much antipathy towards the Mravinsky Bruckner 9 as you do - and we have discussed this before. It's a raw performance, but it's also surprisingly monumental. The strings are marvellous but I don't like the brass - for the same reason I dislike Matacic's NHKSO Bruckner 9 - an epic. There's rawness and there's coarseness. Not the same thing.
I wonder what Mravinsky would have made of Sibelius's Fourth? Not in the Rodzinski class (but who is) but Mravinsky might have done it well, I think.
I appreciated Ralph Moore's assessment of the Mravinsky Sibelius 7. In the '70s and '80s, I was told by Gramophone and such that Mravinsky was THE great Russian conductor. I acquired his Sibelius, his Brahms, his Bruckner, his Prokofiev, his Shostakovich, and guess what, apart from Dawn on the Moskow River, i.E. the Prelude to Konvanschina, I was left scratching my head. It came to a head when I did an intensive comparison of the 10 recordings I had of the Bruckner 9. Mravinsky sounded totally lost at sea. And, between you and me, I have never fallen for his Shostakovich. Here again, I found a lack of poetry, more attack than grace, and there were times when I asked myself, Does Mravinsky understand Shostakovich?
In short, I believe Mravinsky is possibly the most over-rated conductor ever.
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