Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, between April and July 1937. It was premiered in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky, on November 21, 1937. The work was a huge success, and is said to have received an ovation of at least 40 minutes. It is still one of his most popular works. The work was written soon after a highly critical piece was written in the newspaper Pravda which attacked the composers modernist approach to music. The symphony is subtitled “A Soviet Artists Response to Just Criticism”, but many contemporary commentators believe that the piece is a veiled attack on stalinism.

In 1995, after sixteen years of success as a violin soloist and concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Jaap van Zweden embarked on his career as a conductor. He has been a guest conductor with orchestras such as the Orchestre National de France, the Münchner Philharmoniker, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Saint Petersburg and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. From 1996 to 2000, Jaap van Zweden was Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, and in September 2000 he became Chief Conductor of the Residentie Orchestra. In this capacity he toured throughout Europe as well as in South America and Japan. At the start of the 2005-2006 season, Jaap van Zweden was appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. His recent recordings with this orchestra of Bruckner symphonies on the Octavia label received rave reviews. Jaap van Zweden was recently appointed Chief Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. From the 2008-2009 season on, he will also serve as Chief Conductor of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.

October sees Vladimir Ashkenazy interpreting Shostakovich from a recording made at Suntory Hall during a tour of Japan.Ashkenazy has had a longstanding relationship with the Philharmonia Orchestra of which he was appointed Conductor Laureate in 2000. In addition to his performances with the orchestra in London and around the UK each season, he has toured with them worldwide and developed landmark projects such as 'Prokofiev and Shostakovich Under Stalin' in 2003 and 'Rachmaninoff Revisited' in 2002 at the Lincoln Center, New York.