Shostakovich - Symphonies Nos 4 and 11

The Guardian 60

The Boston SO under Andris Nelsons don’t quite bring out the character of these symphonies, but the playing is sometimes stellar
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Andris Nelsons began his Shostakovich cycle only a few months after he became the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director in 2014. The first release, which featured the 10th Symphony, appeared three years ago, and its explosive, high-definition approach seems to have set the tone for what has followed – a set bringing together the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies the following year, and now this pairing of the Fourth and the 11th.

It may be an exaggeration to say that the set juxtaposes the greatest and the least convincing of all 15 of Shostakovich’s symphonies, but the two works are certainly very different. The Fourth is a work of uncompromising directness – far too uncompromising for Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, when, in the wake of the official condemnation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the symphony was withdrawn before its premiere. It was not heard until 1961. Meanwhile the 11th, depicting the events of the 1905 revolution, adheres very much to Soviet prescription, and is an unashamedly programmatic and populist work, sometimes almost cinematic in its literalness.