Festive Overture One of Shostakovich’s most famous works originally composed for a concert to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1917. Symphony No. 5 Its position as one of the 20th Century’s most popular and successful symphonic works is beyond any doubt, the triumph was immediate and greeted Shostakovich’s rehabilitation as a truly great Soviet artist. The Philharmonia Orchestra is widely recognised as the UK’s finest orchestra with an impressive recording legacy. Vladimir Ashkenazy has a longstanding relationship with the orchestra, and in 2000 he was appointed their Conductor Laureate.
"With close on 50 recordings of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony in the Catalogue, it has to be an exceptional account that enters the lists with any hope of getting noticed. Luckily ths is one such. Recorded live at the Suntony Hall in Tokyo in Jult 2001, it is the third release in the Philharmonia’s arrangement with Signum to make the highlights of the orchestra’s archive available on CD. The first of these Dohanayi’s two-disc account of Brahm’s Second and Fourth Symphonies, offered perfectly acceptable readings that didn’t justfy especial excitement, but the second, Mackerras’s account of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, was a corker, a reading that pulled back a curtain on the sustained violence and ferocious energy inherent in the music but not often realized in perfomance." Martin Anderson
"Recorded live in Japan’s Suntory Hall seven years ago, the start of this CD is unremarkable: the banal Festival Overture sounds like a deliberate Shostokovich joke and the Fifth Symphony’s first movement here doesn’t quite catch fire. But the Scherzo does - and the sae voltage-level then sustains right through the wonderful slow movement (with a specialcontribution from the Philharmonia strings) and into the Finale. Before he left the Soviet Union, Ashkenazy had lived through his share of what Shostakovich also had lived through. So here’s a conductor who truely knows what this music is about. It shows." **** Malcolm Hayes
