This is a good but not I think a great performance, taped while the composer was in Paris to record his piano concertos with these same forces (EMI, 4/93). His presence at the sessions may lend the proceedings a certain frisson but cannot transform fallible Gallic winds into fearless Soviet ones any more than our supposedly new-found ability to ‘decode’ the music’s substance has led inexorably to readings of superior insight. The notes attempt to rehabilitate Cluytens’s reputation as a recording artist but, wisely perhaps, make no excessive claims for his Shostakovich. Nor was he quite the first to make a commercial recording of the Eleventh in the West: Leopold Stokowski got there first in Houston with an interpretation of greater individuality and expressive force.
Paul Baily’s remastering for Testament is highly successful, but the results still pale beside Capitol’s sonic spectacular for Stokowski; his recording deserves a place on the shelves of non-specialist collectors, as does one or other Mravinsky for those incontrovertibly authentic Russian sonorities. Well presented as it is, the Cluytens is for Shostakovich completists. The terrifying massacre of “January 9th” is (unsurprisingly) underpowered, the bell-capped climax of the finale is approximate and the third movement “In memoriam” lacks motivation, quite without the extraordinary, Tchaikovskian thrust and passion Stokowski finds there.'