Shostakovich: Symphony No.7 "Leningrad", Kirov Orchestra

While the 7th Symphony is perhaps not as intellectually stimulating or satisfying as Shostakovich’s later symphonies such as the 11th and the 14th, nevertheless it is an electrifying work. Written in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis, the thematic material is infused with a sense of outrage, mixed with very dark humour, and desperate nationalism. This performance, conducted by the insomniac conductor Valery Gergiev, was recorded in 2001, but released this year as part of St Petersburg’s tercentenary celebrations.

Two great orchestras, the Kirov and the Rotterdam Philharmonic, are in stonking good form and the fact that this is a live recording does not detract from the quality of the sound. Gergiev marshals these forces with unfailing expertise; the tempi never drag and dialogue between different voices in the increasingly frenetic 2nd movement is suitably schizoid. Not for the fainthearted, the last movement can set your teeth fairly on edge with its relentless drive.

There are other versions of this symphony which have received good notices, namely the Chandos recording with the RSNO and Neeme Järvi (which has a little too much dynamic variation for my liking) and Bernstein’s 1988 live recording with the Chicago Symphony. But Gergiev’s reading is an important addition to the catalogue; this conductor’s contribution to Russian music-making is legendary already. Don’t buy the new recording with Semyon Bychkov and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln; the orchestra is good, but the deeply unattractive conductor takes too long over the whole, and the music grinds to a halt.

About the symphony’s Leningrad premiere

No recording of this symphony can really be separated from the story of its first Leningrad performance, on 9 August 1942, still under siege. The city’s own Radio Orchestra had gone from 40 players to barely 15 through starvation and combat losses, nowhere near the 100-plus musicians the score demands, so surviving military musicians were pulled in to fill the gaps; three players reportedly collapsed and died during rehearsals. The score itself had to be flown and smuggled into the besieged city on microfilm. On the night, Soviet artillery deliberately targeted German positions beforehand to keep them quiet during the performance, which was then broadcast outward by loudspeaker toward the German lines, a genuine act of psychological warfare as much as a concert. Against that backdrop, any studio or even live modern recording, however well played, is inevitably answering a very different question than what the symphony originally meant to the people who first heard it.