Shostakovich 5 Symphony

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) composed his Symphony No 6 in E flat minor, Opus 111 between 1945 and February 1947, though his sketches date from 1944 - before his completion of the Fifth Symphony. The scoring is for large orchestra includ­ing piccolo, cor anglais, E flat clarinet, contrabassoon, harp, piano, celesta and an array of percussion. Although the key of E flat minor is extremely rare in the symphonic literature, Myaskovsky also wrote a sixth symphony in that key.

Daniel Hope provides a thoughtful and distinctive take on this increasingly familiar music. While his coolly radiant tone can turn fragile and scratchy at times of stress, his interpretations have a patient sobriety recalling David Oistrakh, the great Soviet-era virtuoso to whom the present CD is dedicated.

If you’re only interested in a single disc of Joonas Kokkonen’s music, then let this be the one. It contains three out-and-out masterpieces, stunningly played and recorded with even more vividness and immediacy than on the already superb BIS complete orchestral music edition. Kokkonen’s austere but deeply felt idiom, with its atmospheric tone colors and fleeting lyricism, follows logically on the Sibelius of the Fourth Symphony. This is particularly true of Kokkonen’s Third and Fourth Symphonies, which have much the same feeling of organic growth from just a few simple motives that so often characterizes Sibelius’ work.

Jouni Kaipainen's first two symphonies were in one and two movements respectively but Kaipainen suggests no conclusions should be drawn from the fact that the Third (2004) is in three. The latest symphony is half as long again as No 2 and twice as epic, roaring away from the very first bar. While there are moments of reflection and calm, once it has you in its grip it does not let go. Vividly scored with many solos and ensembles interspersed between passages of invigorating orchestral power, there is a clear thread from start to end. Devotees of Peter Mennin's or Karl Amadeus Hartmann's music will find much to enjoy here.

The Fourth Symphony was written at a particularly crucial point in Tchaikovsky’s life. 1877 was not only the year of his disastrous marriage but also the year in which he began his fifteen-year correspondence with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck. The F minor Symphony has always been a popular work with its muscular and melodic writing. Infused throughout the score is the sense of ‘fate’ which Tchaikovsky believed controlled his destiny as he described in a letter to Madame von Meck, “the fateful force which prevents the impulse to happiness from achieving its goal … which hangs above your head like the sword of Damocles.”

After a decade of success in Hollywood, Erich Korngold returned to concert music during the last decade of his life. The works he wrote did not fit the heady postwar atmosphere, when the avant-garde, strengthened by its distance from the aesthetics of Hitler, ruled the scene. However, more recently the Symphony in F sharp major has had its champions, Andre Previn among them, and it's showing signs of reaching everyday-repertory status. This is all to the good, for the work is enormously enjoyable. Unlike other composers who adopted a kind of diglossia between their concert works and their film scores, Korngold devises an effective fusion where passages that could have come out of Captain Blood are built into larger structures. Sample the first movement.

Multiple Grammy Winner Andris Nelsons and his “superb” (The Guardian) Leipzig orchestra continue their acclaimed couplings of Bruckner and Wagner with Symphony No. 6, which Bruckner himself described as his “boldest” and “most brazen”, and Symphony No. 9, which Bruckner struggled with for a total of nine years until his death. The Symphonies are accompanied by the Wagner’s Prelude to his last complete opera, Parsifal, and the lovely Siegfried Idyll.

Due to its disastrous Viennese premiere in 1954, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Symphony in F sharp was quickly dropped from the repertoire. Yet this late masterpiece, along with Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt, found receptive audiences in the 1970s and has become one of his best-known works. The old criticisms against Korngold's traditional tonality, his conservative formal bent, and his professional Hollywood polish no longer matter; nor should his occasionally spicy dissonances, angular melodies, and ambitious orchestration prove an obstacle to appreciation. Korngold's dense and dramatic symphony may be regarded either as a late development of Mahlerian post-Romanticism or as an offshoot of tonal Modernism, as practiced by Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

Alexander Moyzes, one of the leading Slovakian composers of his generation, created a nationally inspired style that also assimilated trends aligning his music with contemporaries such as Shostakovich. The Eleventh Symphony builds on the success of the Tenth, intensifying its emotional impact and developing sophisticated cycles of transformation and variation. Simpler and more concise than preceding works, the Twelfth Symphony was Moyzes’ final orchestral statement and his ‘diary in music.’ He said it ‘also seeks to express my attitude to life… We have to take life as it is, with all its digressions, demands, and haste.’ The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra was established in 1929 as the first professional symphony orchestra in Slovakia. The orchestra is currently led by conductor Mario Kosik.

Alexander Veprik was regarded as a star in the young Soviet generation of composers of which Dmitri Shostakovich was a member, and his music was enthusiastically performed even in the distant West. But then he fell out of favour as a victim of Stalin's anti-Semitic policies and was banned to the Gulag. His name disappeared from program pages - and has yet to reappear. Veprik's rehabilitation is long overdue, a fact impressively demonstrated by Christoph-Mathias Mueller on this new recording with the fantastic BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Highly expressive melodies, compelling expressivity, and captivating tone colours will fascinate and captivate.