![]() ![]() Shostakovich’s son Maxim emerged as a distinguished interpreter of his father’s work, and his impressive account of the Fifth with the LSO stands at the opposite pole interpretatively from Mravinsky. London Symphony Orchestra (1990) Alto ALC 1067 Yet in between Mravinsky discovers nobility and rare eloquence in the Symphony’s most plangently elegiac music. The finale, opening at a terrifying clip, infuses Shostakovich’s dictatorial march-music with cathartic animal vitality, and it closes like a voice of doom. The tragic stresses of the first movement end in glacial resignation, the scherzo is played as a Russian equivalent of a sardonic Mahlerian Ländler, the slow movement a grief-stricken outcry. But it’s only his late 1983 live performance with the Leningrad Philharmonic that is in good stereo. ![]() He recorded it several times, mainly in mono versions available from companies such as Russian Disc. ![]() Since he conducted the premiere in Leningrad, Shostakovich’s Fifth has been indelibly associated with the name of Evgeny Mravinsky (right). The finale is partly adapted from one of his Pushkin songs, ‘Rebirth’, about a ‘barbarian artist’ defiling the work of genius with scribbles that only time will wear away. On one level the Fifth imitates the favoured Soviet symphonic pattern of progress through struggle to victory. In the wake of the notorious Pravda newspaper attack on his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich produced a newly disciplined structure that unfolds with classically remorseless inevitability. Written at the height of Russia’s Stalinist terror by a composer at risk of his life, it seeks to reaffirm the grand Beethovenian tradition of constructive symphonic power and has gripped audiences since its 1937 premiere. Probably the most-performed modern symphony of the past 75 years, Shostakovich’s Fifth was a crucial work in his development and an act of historic resonance. Whether written as propaganda or with bitter irony, Shostakovich’s Fifth reflects the terror of Stalin’s rule like no other work. ![]()
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