Dimitri Chostakovitch

In this installment in "an ongoing Shostakovich survey", Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra bookend the composer's brilliant, often turbulent symphonic career. Nearly half a century lies between Shostakovich's triumphant debut with the First, premiered before his 20th birthday, and the Fifteenth, an inventory of influences written under the shadow of his own mortality. Penned just two years earlier, the Fourteenth is a symphonic song cycle, and the Chamber Symphony is a skillful adaptation of his tragic String Quartet No. 8. © Deutsche Grammophon

  

“Increasingly, Shostakovich's music is captivating people all over the world and appealing to their deepest emotions. Almost like no other, it bears witness to a traumatic political epoch while remaining a timeless expression of existential human feeling and experience. For me personally,” said conductor Mariss Jansons, who died last year, “Shostakovich is one of the most serious and sincere composers of them all.” After the Sixth, Seventh, and Tenth Symphonies, BR-Klassik is now also releasing the Fifth Symphony by this important composer – performed live by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks under its long-time chief conductor Mariss Jansons. After accusations of formalism directed against Shostakovich in a critical Pravda article had forced the composer to withdraw his Fourth Symphony (it remained shelved until after Stalin's death), the Fifth, written in 1937, was a phenomenal success. It premiered on November 21, 1937 under the young conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. During the applause, which it seemed would never end, Mravinsky waved the score above his head for a good half hour - making it quite clear that the applause was for Shostakovich alone. Officially, the work was interpreted as the return of a prodigal son to the guidelines of Stalinist cultural policy. To this day the music has lost none of its fascination, and the Fifth Symphony ranks as one of Shostakovich’s best-known works. © BR-Klassik

When Shostakovich wrote his Piano Quintet in 1940, most of his chamber music had yet to be composed. Combining formal purity and freedom of tone, the quintet was hailed as a masterly creation and has remained his most successful chamber work. In the last years of a long and productive life, he composed a cycle of songs with piano trio, innovative in both form and structure, a hymn to art, friendship and nature possessing extraordinary evocative power. To tackle these major works of the twentieth century, the Trio Wanderer has chosen partners of the calibre of Catherine Montier, Christophe Gaugué, and an expert in Russian vocal music, Ekaterina Semenchuk. © harmonia mundi

1905 was a year of revolutionary upheaval in pre-Soviet Russia. Shostakovich based this work on the events of one episode of that year, when thousands of workers and their families converged on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to petition the Tsar over their working and living conditions. The Tsar had been advised to leave, no-one was there to accept the petition, and the authorities resorted to cavalry charges to disperse the crowd. With 200 dead and 500 wounded, this incident damaged the Tsar’s reputation and flamed the fire of revolution in the masses. Whether the work was intended as a politically correct commemoration to please his Soviet paymasters, or actually as a commentary on the 1956 Hungarian uprising, remains under debate. There is no doubt, however, that this majestic score, almost filmic in its conception, remains a milestone in Shostakovich’s output. The BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds captures here the tremendous intensity of the work. For perhaps the first time for sixty years, this recording uses four church bells, on loan from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, rather than the standard orchestral tubular bells. Church bells may be heard on the earliest recording of the Eleventh Symphony, by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky in 1959, and may therefore be presumed to have the composer’s approval. John Storgårds has chosen to let them ring on after the end of the work, an option also favoured in performance by Mstislav Rostropovich. © Chandos