Saint Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Dmitriev - Shostakovich: Symphony 7 ‘Leningrad’ (2005) [SACD]

An emotional surrounding account from a conductor & probably at least some players who lived thru the siege of Leningrad described in the music
During the siege of Leningrad, when all the top artists & intellectuals were evacuated, this orchestra remained in the besieged city & performed daily broadcast & concerts, giving hope & inspiring a populous facing a bleak & uncertain future. Thus it is symbolic that it was this very orchestra that premiered Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, an anthem to the indomitable & sacred spirit of man that always triumphs over evil. This recording was made in the renowned Great Hall of Saint Petersburg.
Again it seems Water Lily can’t please everyone:
……Usually live recordings are not too much of a problem, the random spurious human noises not part of the score can be modulated or even deleted from the final recording. Not the case here; the recording engineer, in addition to his purist vision of using only 2 stereo mikes to capture the unenhanced performance gestalt, or whatever he strives for, decided to leave all the audience & random human noises in, fully intact. The result is the complete hi-def experience of persons hacking & croaking away in a most unmellifluous maelstrom of sonic expectoration totally destroying my listening experience. If you use high quality headphones, beware. You will hear every tiny noise when the music floor drops below 40dB.
Water Lily should be ashamed to foist a deeply flawed product like this on the public, trying to mitigate the flaws by liner note babblings that amount to nothing more than maudlin literary boilerplate in service of misdirection from the truth of what this really is: Severely corrupted sonic junk. I am getting rid of this disc & going back to the Rostopovich & National S.O. on Erato. I have several live recording in my collection with audience noises which provide minor annoyance, but this is the worst I have ever heard. Someone should buy the Leningrad Symphony some new chairs: I can hear the ones they are sitting in creak with age as the performers shift their body weight.