Shostakovich Under Stalin’s Shadow: Symphonies 6 & 7 | Deutsche Grammophon 4836728

Shostakovich Under Stalin’s Shadow: Symphonies 6 & 7

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Label: Deutsche Grammophon

Cat No: 4836728

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 2

Genre: Orchestral

Release Date: 22nd February 2019

Contents

About

Deutsche Grammophon proudly continues the widely acclaimed, Grammy winning Shostakovich Symphony Cycle with Music Director Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

In this latest volume of their cycle, conductor and orchestra turn their attention to two symphonies written in the shadow or World War II: the formally innovative No.6, premiered in November 1939, and No.7, most of which was composed in Leningrad in the autumn of 1941, at the beginning of the siege that would cost over a million people their lives. The incidental music that Shostakovich wrote between the two symphonies for a 1941 production of Shakespeare's King Lear and the 1947 Festive Overture conveying "the mood of those who survived the difficult trials of the war years" are also included in this set.

After the "scandalously successful" (Sunday Times) Symphony no.10 in 2015, "the sheer expressive beauty" (Gramophone Magazine) of Symphonies 5, 8 & 9 from 2016 and the "overbearing vividness" (The Guardian) of the most recent Symphonies 4 & 11, Nelsons and the BSO contiue the acclaimed cycle with the Symphonies 6 & 7, complemented by two other works by Shostakovich, the Suite from the Inicidental Music to "King Lear" op.58a and the Festive Overture op.96.

Andris Nelsons is the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the new Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. With both appointments, and in leading a pioneering alliance between these two esteemed institutions, he is firmly underlined as one of the most renowned, exciting and innovative conductors on the international scene today.

Reviews

Objectively speaking, the symphonies in Andris Nelson’s fourth Boston Symphony Shostakovich instalment are a masterpiece (the Sixth) and a curate’s – or rather a commissar’s – egg (the Seventh). Yet this interpretation of the Leningrad pulls it all off with hyper-sophosticated playing and an alternation of tense atmosphere with electrifying release, the kind you usually only get in a live performance.  David Nice (Recording of the Month)
BBC Music Magazine June 2019

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