London Philharmonic Orchestra: Penderecki conducts Penderecki

After waves of enthusiasm greeted his Fifth Symphony, Dmitri Shostakovich had the dubious honour of being fully ‘rehabilitated’ into Soviet life by the authorities. As he focused on film music in 1938, a new symphony began to form in Shostakovich’s mind. It started as a vocal hymn to Lenin, but it became a wordless orchestral canvas rocked by imbalance and confusion. After an opening movement stalked by darkness and anguish, the Symphony gives way to brittle, short-lived jollification – forced and hollow, Shostakovich’s acerbic reflection of his political predicament. Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki conducts Shostakovich’s Sixth here, after the UK premiere of his own Horn Concerto, Adagio for Strings and his profound Threnody.