If I'm honest, I have problems with repeats in a lot of symphonies - the most significant for me Schubert's "Great". That symphony is long enough without them. But conductors should be consistent with repeats, too. Furtwängler was notoriously inconsistent.
But if we have to have repeats then the playing has to be tight - and, yes, done with some passion. The Rachmaninoff is already a long symphony - but it's quite surprising how out of shape and difficult to hold together it gets if the first movement suddenly becomes 25-minutes rather than 20-minutes. Likewise, how long should the Adagio be? Svetlanov thought it should be very long - almost 18-minutes long. In both his Philharmonia and NHK accounts he is just short of that - but he could just as easily be making us think it's a good four-minutes shorter. His performances are well over 60-minutes - and he doesn't take the first movement repeat. But he shifts the balance of the symphony - his first and third movements are more in harmony than many performances are.
Having said that, the Svetlanov performances are not mainstream. But I prefer them to any performances taken with repeats.
(Bit surprised about your Schoenberg comment. Karajan and the BPO in Verklärte Nacht, especially one of his live performances, should cure you or your thinking. It's one of the greatest sounds ever produced by an orchestra.)
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As a lover of Rachmaninov's music in general - I've always said there's more music in a bar of Rachmaninov than in Schoenberg's entire output- the 'Repeat' question doesn't bother me. As long as there is passion, love for Rachmaninov, and a sense of Russian 'echtness', I'm a fan. I must have hidden Russian ancestry, maybe the Barkhoff's were originally from St Petersburgh...( More likely - the Barkhoffs are found in Essen, The Ruhr, they were Polish Coal Miners - My karmic reward is a Polish wife who I have been trying to turn into a housewife since 1989. Then again, she is a published writer/playwright.)
In his review of the John Wilson Rachmaninoff Nr.2 Ralph Moore refers to the Rozhdestvensky recording of the symphony as "notably more leisurely" in comparison (actually some ten minutes longer he writes).
What he doesn't mention is that the reason Rozhdestvensky is longer in the first movement is because he takes the exposition repeat whereas Wilson – and the vast majority of conductors – does not.
This doesn't make Wilson's performance swift; it places his performance entirely in the range of all of the conductors who do not take the exposition repeat in the first movement.
Rozhdestvensky isn't an outlier compared with say, Sanderling and the Philharmonia, or Arwel Hughes, both of whom also take the repeat. Others who do are Litton and José Cura - possibly the best if you want this particular view of the symphony.
Ralph can write about timings - but the context of the performances is also relevant if he does.
The repeat is contentious in my view (many disagree with me, I know). There are any number of superb performances without the repeat that show why it's unnecessary - but very few with it that make the symphony work.