Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Each successive hearing of the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony, on CD or (all too rarely) in the concert hall, prompts a ...

Bernard Haitink's cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies for Decca, studio recordings from the 1980s, remains one of the finest available on disc. The accounts of the Fourth and 10th are not among its ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, the one he was obliged to withdraw during rehearsal in 1936 and waited another 25 ...

Presented as part of Carnegie Hall's Voices of Hope Festival, Andris Nelsons leads the BSO in a 2018 performance at Tanglewood Music Festival of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. Check out the full ...

The Finnish conductor exerts control over these musically very different but culturally significant works, revelling in wildness, perfection and joyful intensity Barely nine months after the final ...

What we have here is a telling snapshot of Shostakovich’s symphonic journey with all its socio-political implications. With the Fourth Symphony we tread the path he might have taken, with the Fifth we ...

If all 15 of Shostakovich’s symphonies pose their problems and enigmas, the Fourth is particularly difficult to pin down and perform convincingly. Its vast structural edifice can appear unwieldy and ...

Stephen Johnson explores Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4, written at the height of the antagonism towards the composer's music, from Stalin himself. Show more Shostakovich was in the middle of writing ...

The chequered performance history of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony has lent it a mystique over and above all the interpretations of what his message – whether public or private – might have been in ...