★★★★★
Valery Gergiev leading the Mariinsky Orchestra. Photograph: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images Though they are rarely yoked together on disc, the three symphonies that Shostakovich composed in the 1930s do make a provocative trilogy. The Fourth, which the composer kept under wraps for 27 years in the wake of the official criticism he had received for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is in many ways the greatest and most uncompromising of all his symphonies; the Fifth, his response to that...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-05-30
★★★★★
Reissuing it with the work at the very opposite end of the canon makes a good deal of sense, though. For there's something about Wigglesworth's approach to the First that seems determined to link it with the mainstream of Shostakovich's symphonic writing, rather than treating it as a brittle example of his early flirtation with neoclassicism (which was followed by the modernist experimentalism of the Second and Third, and only after that by the evolution of a personal, genuinely symphonic style...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-04-24
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDDmitri ShostakovichSix Romances on Verses by English Poets and other worksGerald Finley (baritone) Helsinki Philharmonic/ Thomas SanderlingOndine2014 Gerald Finley, always an intelligent and rewarding singer, has produced something rather special here. In the last year of his life, Shostakovich turned to the beautiful, philosophical poetry of Michelangelo and set a valedictory self-portrait in song, symphonic in its ambition...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-04-13
★★★★★
The Fourth Symphony, completed in 1936 but withheld by the composer until 1961, can be a shattering work, the most original and forward-looking of all Shostakovich's symphonies. After the high standards of Vasily Petrenko's cycle for Naxos so far, you might have expected something special in this vast work, but in the end the performance slightly disappoints...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-10-04
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