For all my fulminating against the ludicrous expurgations that transformed the 1934 Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District into the Katerina Izmailova of 1962, it is good to have both versions available. The latter has two substantially revised and interesting orchestral interludes and a number of considerately modified vocal lines in its favour; the former has that notoriously explicit interlude in Act I which Shostakovich removed in 1962 (if I were writing for a less grave journal than Gramophone I might call it the bonking interlude), and it has the libretto that he originally set. Of no great significance to non-Russian speakers, you might say, since the music is for the most part otherwise identical, but the 1962 emasculations are so extensive that they alter the very colour of the work, as though every reference to Jokanaan's head were to be removed from Salome. In this latter respect, mark you, Rostropovich himself makes one rather curious little excision in the scene after that interlude: ''Now I have no husband but you'' says Katerina to Sergey, to which he sniggeringly replies ''All the women say that—especially the married ones''. Rostropovich cuts this, and an irony is lost: in the first scene of the following act Katerina's father-in-law licks his lips over memories of his youthful whoring after other men's wives in terms very similar to Sergey's: male chauvinist piggery is the opera's leitmotif.
In other respects Rostropovich makes up all that Turtchak on Le Chante du Monde/Harmonia Mundi lacks: a much fuller orchestral sound, a cast with no weak links to it (Turtchak has one or two) and his performance is fitted on to two very generously filled CDs (Turtchak spreads over three). Even more importantly, Rostropovich's projection of the poignant lyricism that underlies the opera's brutality is more full-blooded than Turtchak's, and Vishnevskaya's portrayal of Katerina is more three-dimensional even than Gisela Zipola's fine reading for Turtchak. A bit too three-dimensional, you might think at times, especially when the recording, which favours the singers in any case, seems because of her bright and forceful tone, with its sharpish edge above the stave, to place her rather closer to you than the rest of the cast. But there is no doubt in her performance that Katerina is the opera's heroine, not just its focal character, and in any case Gedda's genially rapacious Sergey, Petkov's grippingly acted Boris, Krenn's weedy Zinovy, Mroz's sonorous Priest, even Valjakka in the tiny role of Aksinya (earthily pungent, and how right that she should laugh chubbily in her first scene!) all refuse to be upstaged. The 'minor' parts are luxuriously cast from artists who may not have had the advantage of singing their roles on stage but have clearly relished building them into vivid portraits. The close focusing on the voices and the relative distancing of the orchestra into a warmer, more ample acoustic is a bit more noticeable on CD than it was on LP; no complaints otherwise.'