Evgeny Mravinsky (conductor)
Mravinsky in Helsinki
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
rec. live, 12 June 1961, Finnish National Theatre, Helsinki
Janus Classics JACL-7 [2 CDs: 75]
Lovers of Shostakoviana of the last century will have been looking forward to this new release from Janus Classics. It’s billed as ‘a legendary rediscovery’, of the last concert of Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic’s Scandinavian tour in 1961, given in Helsinki, with a programme containing the fifth symphonies of Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. The unearthing of the recording was potentially very exciting because another fabled performance from earlier in the same tour, given in Bergen (Altus ALT-127), has proved very difficult to obtain in the UK, even if one is prepared to undertake the requisite remortgage.
My anticipation only increased when I opened the case containing two beautifully packaged CDs, including a substantial and interesting looking booklet. However, as in so many things in life, it pays to read the small print. It is very small indeed on the relevant page: ‘Due to unrecoverable damage to the master tape the entire first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 has been lost and is therefore not included here’. To say this came as a blow was an understatement.
I’m not accusing Janus of bad faith here. If you look on their website advertising the release, the track listing is clearly missing the first movement, so my disappointment is partly a result of my own impulsiveness and desire to believe something fantastic had been uncovered. Nevertheless, releasing a performance in this state is a pretty bold statement aesthetically speaking. Out of respect for the performers and the composer it had better have something compelling to say. Unfortunately I’m not sure that is true of what is left here of the Shostakovich.
In short, it’s decidedly tired sounding. If you didn’t know this was the final concert of a three week tour, you might have been able to guess it was something of the sort. Both middle movements have a somewhat routine, slightly jaded feel to them. Thanks to recent scholarship, Shostakovich’s borrowings from Carmen in this Symphony, particularly in these movements are now well known, but I honestly struggled to detect much Spanish colour or warmth here and the essential delicacy of the dance in the second movement is not realised. If this performance has a unique selling point at all then it revolves around the fact that the start of the final movement is taken at a significantly faster tempo than earlier Mravinsky recordings. This is an interesting interpretative decision, and made much of in the booklet note, but frustratingly there’s no apparent interest shown as to why Mravinsky made the change. I’d like to speculate that it was Mravinsky’s reaction to Bernstein’s famous, indeed sensational, 1959 performance of the Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in Moscow, where his breathtaking playing of the Finale’s coda is taken at almost twice the speed of Mravinsky’s chosen tempo at that time. I do wonder whether, even if he didn’t want to be seen to be aping Bernstein in the final pages of the movement, it caused Mravinsky to think about his approach to its start. Whatever his reasoning, the result of the newly adopted tempo is undeniably exciting, but it seems to slightly confound the players, the strings in particular sound a bit ragged, and by the end of the movement, exhausted.
Unfortunately for them they still had a whole second half to deliver, consisting principally of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. This is reasonably enjoyable, perhaps a representative example of performing practice by Russian orchestras of the indestructible Tchaikovsky in the 1950s and 60s. It’s extremely heart on sleeve, no suggestion of fateful brooding knowingly underplayed, the strings chug on occasion, the brass have a tendency to drown out everybody else and intonation sometimes feels a secondary consideration. But equally it exudes a certain bravura and panache, and the contrasted last two movements deliver a real impact, a relief after the Shostakovich. There is another issue of integrity here too though, albeit more minor. The first nine bars of the first movement are missing from the original recording and so Janus have patched them in from a private master tape of a 1955 studio performance by Mravinsky. Actually it sounds as if we get slightly more than nine bars of that recording, the join coming, I think, in the rests at the end of bar ten, a logical and seamless insertion point. For all my angst about the Shostakovich, I should say I think this is an issue of a different order and the approach taken by Janus reasonable and pragmatic.
The concert concluded with two enjoyable encores. Solveig’s Song from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No 2, which is a genuine rarity, Mravinsky’s only existing recording of Grieg, and a highly idiomatic rendering of Lyadov’s Baba Yaga. There is also two and a half minutes of a speech in French and Russian about the Sibelius Festival of which this concert was a part, so you do get a sense of occasion I suppose.
The original mono recording of this Helsinki concert has been remastered by Janus and what is here apparently represents over 200 hours of work. I can understand them wanting to blow their own trumpet therefore, and they certainly do in the booklet: ‘Janus’ superb remastering has ensured a clean, black sound base and extraordinary clarity, showcasing Mravinsky’s signature precision and power, transcending the limitations of time’. Being more earthbound I’d say the sound is generally good, rather than transcendental, and Janus have done well to reduce audience noise to the extent they have. Sometimes the effects are a little disconcerting though. The violin solo in the Shostakovich Allegretto second movement for example sounds as if it’s in its own acoustic floating somewhere above the orchestra. The dynamic range is also very wide, testing my less than virtuosic reaction times with the volume button.
For Mravinsky enthusiasts or possibly obsessives only then, I think, amongst whom I count the authors of the booklet notes, where throughout a more restrained prose style would have been appreciated. For example, apparently the Leningrad Philharmonic sounded at its peak, ‘as transparent as ice, as smooth as an ocean, and as explosive as a tsunami’. I mean, come on!
Dominic Hartley
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Contents
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony No 5 in D minor, Op. 47 (1937) (movements 2-4 only)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Symphony No 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888)
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55 (1891): Solveig’s Song
Anatoly Lyadov (1855-1914)
Baba Yaga, Op. 56 (1904)
