now playing

start of Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXobjfwFTD8&list=OLAK5uy_nVlRzpJlULP7F5Zfwr7-1k_hKBEqmpn44&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nVlRzpJlULP7F5Zfwr7-1k_hKBEqmpn44

>Completed in 1936 but withdrawn during rehearsal and not performed until 1961, the searing Fourth Symphony finds Shostakovich stretching his musical idiom to the limit in the search for a personal means of expression at a time of undoubted personal and professional crisis. The opening movement, a complex and unpredictable take on sonata form that teems with a dazzling profusion of varied motifs, is followed by a short, eerie central movement. The finale opens with a funeral march leading to a climax of seismic physical force that gives way to a bleak and harrowing minor key coda. The Symphony has since become one of the most highly regarded of the composer's large-scale works.

>Gramophone Recording of the Month, November 2013

>Perhaps the best of Petrenko's much-praised cycle, then, and a strong contender for 'best in catalogue'. The skewed logic of the piece is made gripping, the disparate and the enigmatic reconciled. --Edward Seckerson, Gramophone

>I heard the first London performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony way back when, the Philharmonia conducted by Rozhdestvensky. Though the details have faded from the memory, I recall the audience's response. From the xylophone's dancing skeleton at the beginning to the hushed pedal-point an hour later, this terrific performance by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Vasily Petrenko will leave you equally overwhelmed. --Gramophone