This CD hails from a 1983 live Royal Festival Hall concert at a time when this symphony was much less known than it is now. In the intervening years, many of the usual suspects have recorded it, often as part of an integral cycle. This recording, however, wears its age particularly well!

Rozhdestvenksy had been at the apex of Shostakovich interpreters for years, even in 1983, and his experience shows in the flowing tempo and rhythmic variation in the huge adagio arc of the first movement (almost the length of the other movements combined) without losing either drama or intensity. The string playing is first rate. A relentless unremitting trudge often casts a shadow from which the remainder of the work never recovers.

Even by the standards of Shostakovich’s highly original approach to symphonic structure, the Eighth is certainly problematic. Rozhdestvensky’s account of the two bizarrely juxtaposed scherzi brings out the usual ‘bi-polar’ elements of Shostakovich’s scores in this vein: manic almost febrile gaiety alternating with militaristic aggression and grotesque hecticness. The trumpet episode in the second demonstrates the fine quality of the soloists in the London Philharmonic at that time.

The final two movements pose more interpretive challenges: perhaps Rozhdestvensky moves through the ghostly passacaglia fourth movement more swiftly than, say, Gergiev, but the sense of desolation is potent, with the flute conveying a feeling of utter desolation. Without pause, this movement blends into a final allegretto, deceptively named, as it’s almost as desolate as the preceding movement. The woodwind filigree sounds like green shoots springing from a frozen landscape. I wouldn’t describe the end as ambiguous, it’s too undeniably dark for that, but there is, I suppose, the proverbial glimmer of hope. No hesitation, then, recommending this version beside contemporary readings by Wigglesworth and Gergiev.

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