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JANDL100 wrote:

I will send you a recording Asahina made of the 5th in 1960.   I think you will enjoy it very much as well.  .... dare I say it is even better than Masur !   ;-)   For me, anyway.  Absolutely electric.  It answers even more questions than Masur, and poses some of its own

playing music is like poetic diction. It exists or doesn’t. If it exist then the depth of diction’s complexity become the key. One person can read poetry “as is”, no problem there.  A person who is familiar with poetic language hardly needs any out loud diction to get what he is able to get. Still, there are people who have a talent of poetic diction and their reading of poetry is something different, somthing that set poetry to a very different level, the level of a public event.

The entire art of interaction between voicing of a poem with the poem’s own metaphors, linguistics, articulations, phonetics, rhythms etc, etc…is a very fine and very well-measured artistic endeavor. I do not think that I say anything that you do not know but… from my point of view (among of what I heard) Asahina has absolutely no class of poetic diction. His, macro understanding and macro-impressionism are fine but he does not have class (abilities, time, opportunity or whatever) to express anything thought own diction. One person take a pencil, make a few strokes and you can see a characters or image. Another person would use a gallon of paint on canvass but you still will see juts a nonspecific “accidental spot of color” with no characters and no personality. Asahina just flood sound with partially in-tune sound and nothing else. A good chef give you a cucumber and beans salad that tastes like filey milon and crappy cook will dump on your plate a pile of cucumbers, beans, give to you a bottle of some kind of source and would suggest you to improvise. To me Asahina, at least among a few CDs that I have, demonstrated himself as very bad cook.

Still, I less care about Asahina and his orchestra but I feel that it does make sense to talk about it in context the specific Shostakovich 5th. Pay attention with the Masur/Chicago there is no accident and everything is subordinated by a very strong will and sense of purpose. It would be a different subject if you found THAT Masur/Chicago play as something how you would play the work yourself. I happened absolutely mad about the ways how Masur organized everything in there, particularly in the first and the last movements. It is exactly what I call the demonstration of superb and VERY sophisticated Poetic Diction from Masur (who is not my most beloved conductor BTW) where intensification and reduction of artistic pressure happens with a super-moderated sense of power and control, the power that took the work much further then where it was originally intended by  in a way simpleton-Shostakovich.

From my point of view that performance is one of many greatest committed to media musical event I have in my collection.

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