[SACD-R][OF] Шостакович – Симфония №7 ‘Leningrad’ (Saint Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, Александр Дмитриев) - 2005 (Classical)

The 3rd in an occasional series of Water Lily Acoustics SACDs.
An emotional surrounding account from a conductor & probably at least some players who lived thru the siege of Leningrad described in the music
During the siege of Leningrad, when all the top artists & intellectuals were evacuated, this orchestra remained in the besieged city & performed daily broadcast & concerts, giving hope & inspiring a populous facing a bleak & uncertain future. Thus it is symbolic that it was this very orchestra that premiered Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, an anthem to the indomitable & sacred spirit of man that always triumphs over evil. This recording was made in the renowned Great Hall of Saint Petersburg.
Again it seems Water Lily can’t please everyone:
……Usually live recordings are not too much of a problem, the random spurious human noises not part of the score can be modulated or even deleted from the final recording. Not the case here; the recording engineer, in addition to his purist vision of using only 2 stereo mikes to capture the unenhanced performance gestalt, or whatever he strives for, decided to leave all the audience & random human noises in, fully intact. The result is the complete hi-def experience of persons hacking & croaking away in a most unmellifluous maelstrom of sonic expectoration totally destroying my listening experience. If you use high quality headphones, beware. You will hear every tiny noise when the music floor drops below 40dB.
Water Lily should be ashamed to foist a deeply flawed product like this on the public, trying to mitigate the flaws by liner note babblings that amount to nothing more than maudlin literary boilerplate in service of misdirection from the truth of what this really is: Severely corrupted sonic junk. I am getting rid of this disc & going back to the Rostopovich & National S.O. on Erato. I have several live recording in my collection with audience noises which provide minor annoyance, but this is the worst I have ever heard. Someone should buy the Leningrad Symphony some new chairs: I can hear the ones they are sitting in creak with age as the performers shift their body weight.
~some guy on Amazon

Also from Amazon:
The interpretation is 1 of the best I’ve heard up to now, and& the recording honours the “Water Lilly” recording label.
AudAud review:
It would be difficult to find a more appropriate & emotional connection between a musical work, the performers playing it, & the location of the performance. Shostakovich may have conceived of his 7th Symphony before the Nazis began their siege of Leningrad (now again St. Petersburg) but the work depicts with brutal realism the threat to the people of the great city from the enemy war machine. It was even performed in Leningrad during the 900-day siege by this very same orchestra, with army band musicians filling in for missing members of the symphony. Some critics of the time & even today dismiss the work as overdoing the cinematic battle scene bit in a transparent bid to win favor with the Soviet authorities by stepping up the propaganda values of the work. There is plenty of such noisy display for sure, but it is little different from the 5th Symphony in that respect, & with the “best seat in the house” aural perspective of this purist 2-mike recording the clangorous climaxes aren’t nearly as in-your-face as on most multimiked recordings of the work.
In fact the conclusion of this symphony is very similar to the composer’s 5th. The performance is fiery & committed; when the heroic theme comes to the fore in the final movement one empathizes with the players as much as the wartime residents of Leningrad – that they have made it thru the harrowing experience of the siege. As with the other Water Lily Russian series recordings, this was done at a live concert. There are some rather odd audience sounds occasionally (I’m used to Russian audiences remaining so quiet that live recordings sound like studio efforts) but they are worth the realism & natural acoustics of this excellent multichannel effort.
~John Sunier

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