Contrasting symphonies by the brilliant but troubled Dmitri Shostakovich get deluxe treatments from conductor Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony. Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after ...

A performance for the ages – the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under the charismatic yet calculated baton of Andris Nelsons give life to Shostakovich’s mighty 8th Symphony. 2011 winner of the ...

The Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 8 is a vivid historical record of World War II life in the Soviet Union. The San Antonio Symphony on Friday night took its audience of about 1,800 people there and ...

The Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra performs Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8. The extraordinary gravity of the Eighth marks a new high in conductor Alain Altinoglu undertaking of the complete ...

Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 5 and No. 8 Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Kurt Sanderling, conductor (Berlin Classics, two CDs). Kurt Sanderling made recordings of several Shostakovich symphonies for the ...

I was fulsome in my praise of Stokowski’s VW Eighth on its initial release on BBC Radio Classics (4/96 – nla). Hearing it again has merely reinforced my admiration for a performance of such abundant ...

The Music Shostakovich was in bad odour with the Soviet authorities after the Second World War, as he had been in the 1930s, for writing ‘personal’ rather than ‘official’ music. The Tenth Symphony ...

Contrasting symphonies by the brilliant but troubled Dmitri Shostakovich get deluxe treatments from conductor Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony. Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after ...

If the booklet-notes are anything to go by, the conductor identifies this music with the hectic activity of war. So you can forget Sanderling, Rozhdestvensky, Haitink, Rostropovich or Wigglesworth.

A health warning: it is not advisable to listen to this pair of discs in one go. The second volume in the ongoing Shostakovich symphony cycle from Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra is a ...