By Jonathan Blumhofer

The performances on the recording exhibit no conception of Shostakovich’s style – where is this music’s irony and sarcasm, let alone pathos? – not to mention any sense of how to navigate large-scale forms.

Well, that was short-lived.

Just months after lending his hand(s) to one of the year’s finest recordings, Klaus Mäkelä has returned to his old ways – namely, proving how thoroughly out of his depth he is when it comes to the symphonic canon. Granted, few 28-year-olds can be expected to have mastered Dmitri Shostakovich at his most troubled and tortured. But that begs the question: why would this one be any different?

On the evidence of Mäkelä’s interpretations of the Symphonies Nos. 4, 5, and 6, he’s not. Now, that isn’t to say that the Oslo Philharmonic’s playing here doesn’t impress: it does. So does Decca’s engineering, which renders these sometimes highly dense scores with impressive presence and clarity.

But there’s absolutely no sense of character on display in Mäkelä’s conducting. At least not character approaching the focus, intensity, purpose, and understanding of, say, Rudolf Barshai, Kirill Kondrashin, Bernard Haitink, or Mariss Jansons in this music. Or Vasily Petrenko, Andris Nelsons, Esa-Pekka Salonen, or Mark Wigglesworth. Or…the list could go on.

Instead, we’ve got performances that exhibit no conception of Shostakovich’s style – where is this music’s irony and sarcasm, let alone pathos? – not to mention any sense of how to navigate large-scale forms.

Take the Fourth Symphony, which receives a reading that’s most notable for its unexpected lyricism and almost complete want of tension. Emerging as basically an hour-long note salad, there’s no evident structural cohesion in Mäkelä’s reading, either. Instead, we get a series – many series, in fact – of disconnected moments.

True, some of them are striking. The first movement’s fugue is vigorous and the transition into its recapitulation has moments of real atmosphere. But the former is also shapeless and frenetic. The actual recap plods.

So, amazingly, do the octave leaps passed through the orchestra before the fugue. These should be furious, aggressive, terrifying. Instead, they sound anemic and lame. The less said about the Moderato (it’s tedious and inexplicably too slow) and Finale (an interpretive reprisal of the first movement) the better.

Not much improves in the Fifth or Sixth Symphonies.

The former’s first movement misses any sense of the music’s edginess; the results are expressively bloodless and antiseptic. Its Allegretto is lumbering and heavy-footed, coming out about as unironically as can be imagined. Though the Largo starts out well, it’s undone by an underwhelmingly lyrical climax, as well as inconsistent articulations of the score’s accents. The finale, too, despite a lively start, becomes sluggish and unfocused.

In the Sixth, Mäkelä seems to have two settings: slow and super-fast. The big opening movement is certainly songful and the flute duet near the end offers welcome, night music personality. But that doesn’t quite compensate for the reading’s overarching dullness.

Neither do the last two movements. Granted, it’s exciting to hear the Oslo Philharmonic navigate the Allegro’s treacherous runs and the Presto’s scamping figurations at such a frantic pace. But it would have been better had conductor and orchestra invested more energy in mining the music’s impish character and observing its written dynamic phrasings (some of which, as they demonstrate, are impossible to pull off when played too briskly).

As a whole, then, the enterprise is a bit of a mess. If it weren’t such remarkable music, perhaps it would matter less.

But these three scores reflect a composer persevering through unimaginable hardship and suffering: the last two symphonies date from Stalin’s Great Terror and the Fifth is, famously, Shostakovich’s reply to life-threatening criticism (really!) from the dictator himself. At the very least, this is music that deserves better than an oblivious conductor tooling around with his shiny orchestra.

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.