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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Shostakovich's last symphony had a positive, but bemused, reception when it appeared in the West in 1972. Why the Rossini and Wagner quotations? What other allusions and codes lurked behind the often austere musical facade? Ormandy's recording arrived soon after and, like those of the previous two symphonies, made available to US and UK audiences a performance which is always musical, with playing and recording that sound excellent even now. Shostakovich today is a more complex and ambiguous figure than even this work, emotionally powerful for all its inscrutability, seemed to suggest. The funeral procession of the slow movement and subversive calm of the finale are well conveyed by Ormandy, focusing on pure musical expression without interpretative gimmicks. Emil Gilels's magisterial 1965 account of the Second Piano Sonata is much more than a fill-up. Among the composer's more neglected works, its inwardness and abstraction must have felt out of place in wartime conditions, but hindsight shows just how indicative of Shostakovich's later music it was to be. As with the symphony, this is thought-provoking music, worth taking time getting to know.--Richard Whitehouse
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