Symphony no.4

Valery Gergiev - today's outstanding champion of the music of Shostakovich - leads the Kirov orchestra in a blazing account of the first of the War Symphonies.

"As usual, there isn't a dead bar or an underarticulated phrase in Gergiev's latest Shostakovich recording - all the more amazing as the composer's wildest symphony constantly tries to trick us into believing its heart is frozen….the dynamic range is impressive."
***** Five Stars (Pick of the Month) BBC Music Magazine (Jan 05)

"A notable addition to the on-going Shostakovich cycle from Gergiev and his colleagues, aided and abetted by the recording"
- MusicWeb Feb 2005

"...the cruel struggle between the human and the blind, and mechanically inhuman which stands opposed to it."
from a review of the first performance in 1961

Begun in September 1935 Shostakovich's 4th Symphony was to be a crucial turning point - both in his life and his music.

During it's composition Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and did not like it. Two days later Pravda published a harsh attack on the opera, followed by a savage attack on Shostakovich's new ballet score The Limpid Stream. The message was clear that composers would now be expected to follow the party line.

The planned first performance of the 4th Symphony by the Leningrad Philharmonic did not take place, and it was not until 1961 that Kondrashin conducted a reconstructed account of the lost symphony in Moscow