“< the same metronome marking is an> is an indicative of the regime’s insistence on shoehorning everyone into the same artificial moulds”
Very good point! Never thought of it that way, but makes great sense, thank you for pointing it out.

I’ve always seen tempo markings as somewhat problematic – as you say people often say ‘that’s far too slow’ when they compare recordings to ideals that they hold in their mind (usually taken from other recordings). However, I doubt many composers would object if their tempo markings were subtly changed if it made a performance and therefore the presentation of the piece more successful. How boring would it be if all cellists chose exactly the same tempos for the Dvorak concerto! (Another piece where the normal tempos that one hears very rarely bear any relation to what is printed in the score).

To take the example of the Shostakovich – He’s clearly trying to tell us something, but it’s not immediately obvious what (apart from play the damned movements at 100 perhaps! Just a little point – the second movement is actually minim = 100, but the basic pulse is the same as before of course). If we look at this concerto in the wider context of his other late music, we see that he often slips into a sort of desperately sad ambivalence – no longer the angry, dissonant, desperately struggling works of his earlier pieces (e.g. the first cello concerto). That is not to say that this music does not contain the pain and struggle, agony, ecstasy, irony, and beauty that makes Shostakovich’s works so brilliant and popular, rather that it is expressed with a different voice, sadder, more desolate, perhaps ‘deeper’. We could ruminate for hours about what it means – whether he is saying, that whatever you do, you are constricted by the ‘meter’ of you society; or whether we can have meaning and expression despite the oppressive monotony of the regime; or maybe as I said before, a sort of numb ambivalence, that in the end, all our choices come to the same end. The fact that it is exactly 100, and not say 96 or 104 is surely also significant, and perhaps indicative of the regime’s insistence on shoehorning everyone into the same artificial moulds, the same strangling designs and compartments. But maybe not!

I could probably highlight hundreds of my favourite moments in this great work, but I think the odd ending, the bleakest and bare moment in the whole work, finished by that small sudden crescendo to a staccato, is possibly an evocation of death.

All this is highly subjective of course, and possibly not even worth stating in the public arena, but I just felt the need to respond to this post in my non-sequitur rambling way because I liked it so much.

As Casals amply demonstrates in many of his recordings, it is not speed but energy that dictates how fast we experience something as. And I think (though you may not agree), that Rostropovich captures the core of this work better than any other cellist on record, even if he does take certain liberties with the speeds. Shostakovich might have mentioned something to him if he was displeased, but then of course, Shostakovich was such a shy character that he praised everyone, no matter what they played like, just to save his and their own embarrassment.