Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 – Masur

There is something almost perverse about hearing the Leningrad Symphony played by an American orchestra with impeccable manners, in a hall built for Brahms and Mahler, decades removed from the actual siege — and yet that dislocation is precisely why some conductors’ accounts of it can feel more honest than others. Kurt Masur’s 1998 reading, now trotted back out on Warner’s Apex line at a price that will not trouble anyone’s budget, is a case in point: careful, humane, sometimes moving, never overwhelming. Whether that is a virtue depends entirely on what you think this strange, sprawling symphony is actually for.

Masur came to this score with credentials nobody could question. Leipzig-born, trained in the German tradition that runs through Furtwängler and Karl Böhm even as he built his own severe, unfussy podium manner with the Gewandhaus — he knew something about music written under totalitarian pressure, having spent much of his career negotiating the East German cultural bureaucracy himself. That biography matters here. His Shostakovich carries no ideological axe. He is not out to prove the symphony is really about Stalin rather than Hitler, as some post-Volkov revisionists insisted through the ‘80s and ‘90s. He simply plays the notes, trusts the architecture, and lets listeners draw their own conclusions.

The first movement is where this approach pays off best. Masur’s tempo for the opening Allegretto is broad without dragging — there’s a granite quality to the string tone, the New York violins digging in with real weight — and the long G-major theme, when it arrives, breathes without wallowing. Then comes the notorious “invasion” episode: that snare drum tattoo, repeated a dozen times in a Ravel-esque crescendo that Shostakovich himself admitted was shameless in its vulgarity. Masur refuses to conduct it as spectacle. No podium theatrics, no artificial hairpin dynamics to goose the excitement — he simply lets the orchestration do what Shostakovich wrote it to do, layer by layer, until the whole apparatus is bearing down with a weight that feels inevitable rather than manufactured. It’s a legitimate choice. Bernstein, in his Chicago album, makes the same passage feel unhinged, almost sadistic in its inexorability; Masur’s version is more like a newsreel than a nightmare. I missed the nightmare, a little, but I understood the argument for the newsreel.

The bassoon solo that emerges from the wreckage afterward — long-breathed, desolate — is beautifully taken by the Philharmonic’s principal, phrasing with an ache that never curdles into sentimentality.

Movement two is where Masur’s instincts serve the music best. The opening string writing is genuinely nuanced, almost chamber-scaled, and the oboe’s wistful solo growing out of it has real character — a touch of vinegar under the sweetness. Then the sardonic middle section arrives, that spiky 3/8 episode with its screeching E-flat clarinet, and the New York winds turn appropriately vulgar, almost cabaret-nasty. This is Shostakovich’s satirical voice, the one that runs from the Ninth Symphony back through “Lady Macbeth” — and Masur clearly relishes it.

The slow movement is where things grow more ambivalent for me. Patient, yes. Songful, certainly — the NYPO strings play with real tonal richness, dark and covered in the lower registers. But patient can shade into merely deliberate, and there are stretches where I wanted more anguish, more of the naked grief that Bernstein or, further back, Mravinsky (whose association with this score goes back to the actual 1942 circumstances of its composition) bring to this music almost by default. Masur gives you the notes in luminous proportion. He does not quite give you the howl underneath them.

Which brings me back to Kozinn’s line about “poster art” versus “human drama” — quoted, I notice, in Canarina’s history of the orchestra. I understand the impulse behind the compliment, but I’d put it differently: Masur strips away the poster art, certainly, replacing bombast with sobriety. Whether what remains is wrenching drama or something more like elegant reportage is a matter of taste. My own sympathies lean toward interpreters willing to risk vulgarity, willing to let the finale’s peroration feel not triumphant but hollow and forced — because that ambiguity, I’ve always believed, is the real subject of this symphony, the thing that separates it from actual Soviet poster art. Masur’s finale is stirring, well-built, cleanly played by an orchestra clearly at the top of its concert form that week. It does not trouble me the way it should.

At Apex’s bargain price, with decent if not distinguished 1998 sonics — some congestion in the loudest tuttis, the brass occasionally covering inner string detail — this is a perfectly respectable way to get to know the symphony, and considerably cheaper than chasing down Bernstein or Mravinsky on full-price reissues. But respectable is the operative word. This Leningrad tells the truth without quite telling all of it.