The third, polyglot version of the Fourteenth Symphony was sanctioned by the composer but it remains something of a rarity on disc; some vital and specific tone colour is lost along with the original note values, and the ‘three lilies’ adorn the grave of “The Suicide” more elegantly in the Russian. Bernard Haitink may not agree. He elected to use the multilingual text in his 1980 recording and now Joseph Swensen presents this unexpectedly compelling alternative. We tend to take sonic excellence for granted these days but this struck me as a true state-of-the-art recording with the soloists more naturally placed than in the rival Decca issue and an orchestral sound combining great clarity with just enough hall resonance.

The performance has character too, if lacking the pervasive chill of the earliest Soviet accounts. The conductor, still more familiar to UK readers in his previous guise as a Dorothy DeLay-trained violin prodigy, secures excellent results from the Tapiola Sinfonietta. They are a lean and super-efficient group, yet without the loss of character this can sometimes imply. Of the soloists, the young bass-baritone Petteri Salomaa is particularly impressive: his is a voice of rare tonal beauty, a Billy Budd rather than a Boris. His pronunciation is a little odd at times – something more noticeable in a version which has the singers feigning familiarity with four languages – but you may not see this as a problem. Tempos are perceptibly more ‘extreme’ than Haitink’s, with the opening “De profundis” dangerously slow in the modern manner and a strikingly well-characterized instrumental contribution to “A la Sante” (“In the Sante Prison” – or “Priseaux” as it tends to come out here).

The fillers, larger than life, brilliantly dispatched and curiously inappropriate, are based on original quartet pieces which only came to light in the mid 1980s. The first shares material with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; the second appears as the polka from The Age of Gold! This is nevertheless a more rewarding, more probingly conducted disc than most of the current Shostakovich crop.

-- Gramophone [4/1996]