Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No. 5 | Manfred Honeck | WDR Symphony Orchestra

Dmitrij Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor op. 47 performed by the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the baton of conductor Manfred Honeck on March 11, 2022 in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall.
Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No. 5 in D minor op. 47
00:00:00 I. Moderato
00:16:51 II. Allegretto
00:22:42 III. largo
00:37:49 IV. Allegro non troppo
WDR Symphony Orchestra
Manfred Honeck, conductor
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○ Introduction
At least four of Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonies are directly related to war events. But his other eleven symphonies also tell of troubled, horrific times, of living and dying in a dictatorship. As long as he stayed on the party line, he was rarely threatened with trouble; usually, however, the slightest hint of dissidence was enough to bring him into disfavor. Shostakovich had ventured into the life-threatening zone with the opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk". Comrade Stalin was already threatening - anonymously, but blatantly - Siberia.
The dictator explicitly demanded "Soviet classicism". But what was that? In any case, ingenious and heroic like Beethoven, but not in the style of 1820, but expressing the spirit of the current era; renouncing techniques of the 'decadent' West, of course; the highest technical standard, if you please, without exceeding the horizon of the revolutionary proletariat - finished was the Soviet symphony! And Shostakovich set to work. Striving to make amends, he composed this showpiece of a supposedly Soviet aesthetic with the 5th Symphony.
In the opening movement, it is as if Shostakovich had set his personal situation to music: the spring months of 1937 in the Crimea, accompanied by happy youthful memories, and his subsequent return to Leningrad when he learned of his sister's deportation. The Allegretto also has a double bottom. A coarse merriment wafts through this second movement, without one having the idea of witnessing dancing revelries of merry comsomolers. The Largo was even less subject to the usual real-socialist patterns of interpretation, and the critics promptly accused the composer of having chosen a color scheme "of the dead and gloomy". After the profundity of the first three movements, the noisy march finale can hardly be taken seriously. The listeners of the first performances in Leningrad and Moscow are reported to have recognized the parody of the triumphalism of those days very well.
Text: Volker Tarnow