Suite from Moscow, Cheryomushki Op 105
The housing crisis in Khruschevera Soviet Russia. It may not sound like the most likely starting point for a comic operetta, but Dmitri Shostakovich managed to conjure a surprisingly entertaining piece of music theatre from the state-approved storyline crafted by librettists Victor Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky. The drama revolves around a group of Muscovites as their struggles to obtain a coveted apartment in the new Cheryomushki estate on the outskirts of the city bring them face-to-face with the might (and corruption) of Soviet bureaucracy. It’s a light-hearted, satirical work, and any fears of an unhappy ending are instantly dispelled in the uproarious opening seconds of this four-part orchestral suite.

The first movement, ‘A spin through Moscow’, sets off at a rollicking pace, with cymbal crashes, oom-pah strings and bombastic brass interjections reeling off a giddy tune that will leave audiences (or rather, passenger) dizzy. Next up is a melancholy waltz that begins with a solo violin before the saxophone takes over. This is the duet of newlyweds Sasha and Masha, who long to live together, but who have to bid each other farewell every night as they return to their respective dwellings. As they imagine dancing with friends in their dream home, the music takes flight into a grand, sweeping fantasy, before resigning itself to the melancholy mood of the opening. The toe-tapping ‘Polka-Galop’ begins with dignified poise, but then a series of raucous trombone glissandi signals a departure into all-out mayhem, with warbling clarinets and an onslaught of percussion. The lilting violin solo and the bobbing, duetting clarinets of the concluding ‘Ballet’ confirm that the Muscovites have triumphed in their quest for new homes. As the melody of Sasha and Masha’s duet soars to great heights, augmented by piccolo and snare drum, the Suite whirls to a bustling close.

Shostakovich was famously dismissive of the operetta, writing privately to his friend, Isaac Glikman, that it was: “Boring, unimaginative, stupid.” Yet despite his misgivings, the work was turned into a popular Soviet film. Released in 1962, it features an eye-popping interpretation of the newlyweds’ fantasy waltz, involving a birdbox which magically transforms into an apartment block, and from which, there springs an entire corps de ballet. Not bad for an opera about the Soviet housing crisis.
Sophie Rashbrook

Symphony No. 1 in F minor Op 10
Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies span his entire composing career, and are without doubt the most important contributions to the genre of any 20th-century composer. His first symphony dates from 1924/25, at the very end of his student days, and his last from 1971, by which time he was mortally ill. The symphonies are intimately bound up with the history and culture of the Soviet Union, reflecting the profound and often tragic upheavals endured by Russia in the course of a disastrous social experiment during which untold millions of her citizens died—casualties of war and of their own government’s Great Terror. Shostakovich—like all his fellow artists—was faced with a stark choice: to toe the repressive official line and produce music of consummate blandness, or refract the true horrors of Stalin’s reign through the prism of his art, and face disgrace and death. In fact, he navigated an infinitely dangerous path: his public pronouncements about his work (often deliberately couched in naïve and self-deprecating terms) cast himself as a Good Soviet Artist, while secretly his music told a different, encoded story of despair, humiliation and outrage at the miseries inflicted on the Russian people.

Shostakovich’s First Symphony belonged to a more innocent age. He first thought of writing a symphony in the summer of 1923, just after he had graduated from the piano faculty of the Petrograd Conservatory and was about to embark on an intensive study of composition. The project had barely got underway before Lenin’s untimely death in January 1924 prompted the young composer (he was only 17) to plan a memorial symphony, but this grandiose plan fell victim to his inexperience. He returned to the symphonic fray six months later, intending to submit a symphonic graduation piece, and began work on the scherzo. But in October he got a job playing the piano for silent films at a Leningrad cinema, which drained his energy. By the end of December he had more or less finished the first movement in piano score, and less than two months later (when he started a second spell as a cinema pianist), he had finished all the movements except the finale. The whole work was finally completed at the beginning of July 1925. Shostakovich showed it to his composition teacher, Maximilian Steinberg and, early in the spring of 1926, he and a fellow student played a two-piano version of it before the examining board of the Leningrad Conservatory, presided over by the Conservatory’s director, Glazunov. The board was duly impressed, and in May 1926, Nikolai Andreyevich Malko, chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic and professor of conducting at the Conservatory, scheduled the symphony’s premiere in a programme of new music given by the Leningrad Philharmonic as the last concert of the season. The orchestra found Shostakovich’s music difficult, but everyone recognised that here was an emerging new talent. On the night of the premiere, Malko wrote prophetically: “I have a feeling that I have turned over a new page in the history of symphonic music, of a new great composer”. Shostakovich himself was delighted with the success of his piece. He wrote to a friend:

My Symphony went magnificently yesterday. I felt a contact between composer, conductor, orchestra and audience … The success was huge. The public hall was full. The public applauded a great deal, and I went out five times to take a bow. Everything sounded uncommonly good …

International success followed: the symphony was given in Berlin a year later by Bruno Walter (who had been much impressed by Shostakovich’s performance earlier that year in the first Chopin International Piano Competition); and it was quickly taken up by Stokowski in Philadelphia, Sir Hamilton Harty in Manchester and Rodzinski in New York.

The First Symphony belonged to a period in which experimentation was still encouraged in Soviet music. Although the arts were already being regarded as propaganda instruments, disseminating Marxist ideology and influence to social and moral behaviour, the worst excesses of Stalin’s regime lay in the future. The prevailing ideology of the 1920s was quite happy to encourage artists to épater les bourgeois, and works by composers such as Bartók, Berg, Hindemith, Milhaud, Schreker and Stravinsky were frequently performed in Moscow and Leningrad. Such works inevitably influenced the young Shostakovich at a formative stage in his own career, and it is not surprising that the First Symphony has echoes of several of these, as well as earlier Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky and Scriabin. It is cast in conventional symphonic format, in four distinct movements, with the scherzo placed second and the slow movement third. But the musical language is far from conventional. The piece is almost Expressionist in its abrupt changes of mood, in which violent outbursts alternate with passages of tenderness or irony—the first movement, for example, alternates a march and a waltz, while the second, a moto perpetuo, opens in burlesque style, while its slow middle section sounds weirdly archaic. Shostakovich unifies the symphony by his use of recurring motifs, many derived from the material of the opening Allegretto. The most dramatic of these is a fanfare-like motif, first heard on the brass during the course of the expressive, almost Mahlerian slow movement. This six-note fanfare recurs on solo timpani toward the end of the finale, in the same rhythm, but with the order of the notes reversed.

Shostakovich quoted the opening motif of the First Symphony in his greatest, most intimate and deeply autobiographical string quartet, the Eighth (1960), “written in memory of the victims of fascism and war”. He also alludes to it in his Ninth and Fifteenth symphonies—the last a summation of his life’s achievement.
Wendy Thompson

Philharmonia Records © 2026

The Philharmonia & Shostakovich
The music of Shostakovich has become such an established part of the repertoire that one might almost forget how controversial a figure he was during his lifetime, and that any orchestra championing his music did so in defiance of political wranglings still fresh in the memory. Shostakovich’s symphonic output charts the ups and downs of a rollercoaster life. He wrote his First Symphony aged 19; the Second followed in 1927, when he admitted that he “composed a lot under the influence of external events”—words that would prove prophetic.

Shostakovich first fell out of favour with Stalin’s regime in 1936, when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was condemned in the state newspaper, Pravda, as “Muddle Instead of Music”. Between 1936 and 1945, Shostakovich composed a symphony (Nos 4-9) roughly every two years. The Fourth was a reaction to the Pravda denouncement, Shostakovich later explaining: “the authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent and expiate my sin. But I refused. I was young then, and had my strength. Instead of repenting, I composed the Fourth Symphony.” Following troubled rehearsals, he withdrew the work—or was forced to—and it would not be played again for another 25 years. The first performance outside the USSR took place at the Edinburgh Festival on 7 September 1962. The orchestra? The Philharmonia, conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. In his book on the Philharmonia Orchestra, Stephen J Pettitt describes an ensemble of “nine horns, two tubas, five trumpets and triple woodwind… It made an astonishing contrast with the sight of its composer, a timid little man who had to return repeatedly to the platform and be pushed on to acknowledge the ovation.”

The Fourth Symphony was paired on that occasion with Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto, with David Oistrakh as soloist. Oistrakh had premiered the piece in Leningrad in 1955, and gave its London premiere on 23 February 1956, with the Philharmonia conducted by Nicolai Malko. (It was also Malko who, having conducted the premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 1 in 1926, conducted the Philharmonia’s first performance of the work, at a concert in Sheffield on 23 October 1953). Pettitt describes the Violin Concerto’s Edinburgh premiere: “Oistrakh gave it another inspired performance… and the Philharmonia provided flawless support. They gave equal dedication to the mysterious Fourth Symphony”. This concert was part of a festival-wide celebration of Shostakovich, who was present throughout. Pettitt paints the picture: “Several leading Soviet composers were there to add their support to this theme, and the Philharmonia were to take a leading part, too. Their first concert, in the Usher Hall on 4 September, crowded 108 players onto the platform for the first performance in the west of Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony, completed only the previous year. That the Philharmonia played it outstandingly well was due in no small measure to the conducting of Gennady Rozhdestvensky, with whom they had no fewer than five rehearsals before leaving London, in addition to the rehearsal on the day of the concert.”

By this time, the Philharmonia had begun what would become an extensive recorded legacy of Shostakovich’s works. Extensive—but selective, too; before this present recording, the orchestra recorded the Symphony No 1 just once before, in March 1957, conducted by Efrem Kurtz at Kingsway Hall. Other milestones followed, including Shostakovich’s son Maxim conducting the New Philharmonia in the UK premiere of his father’s Symphony No 15 in November 1972; Sir Simon Rattle choosing to conduct Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10 at his Philharmonia debut on 15 February 1976; and on 28 March 2014 Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the orchestra in the first Russian performance of the unfinished opera Orango, given at the Moscow Conservatory.

One of Stalin’s main criticisms of Shostakovich was of his film music, recorded in a chilling transcript in which he claimed: “The orchestra crackles, squeals, pipes, jingles, disturbs your visual images. Why is leftism so tenacious in music?” There is something exhilarating, then, about the recent film treatment of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10, a work that had been composed as a response to Stalin’s death in 1953. The film, by South African artist William Kentridge, satirises Stalin, and was shown in 2025 accompanied live in a “gripping performance” (The Guardian) given by the Philharmonia, conducted by Marin Alsop. Stalin may as well have asked why Shostakovich himself was “so tenacious”: against the odds, and despite the crushing experiences he endured, his musical legacy lives on.

Joanna Wyld © 2026