Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 4, 5 & 6

Moscow, 1936: A Suitcase by the Door

In 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich never undressed before going to sleep.

He kept a small packed bag resting by the door. Night after night, he waited for the footsteps of the NKVD, praying only that if he were dragged into the night, it would happen without waking his sleeping wife and infant daughter. Under this asphyxiating shadow, he wrote his most monstrous and uncompromising masterpiece, the Fourth Symphony—only to lock the score in a drawer for a quarter of a century.

Finnish podium phenomenon Klaus Mäkelä and the Oslo Philharmonic present Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 as a singular monumental triptych on Decca Classics. At twenty-eight, Mäkelä approaches these scores free from conservatory mannerisms, staring down the abyss with icy Scandinavian clarity.

The Hollow Rejoicing of the Fifth

Symphony No. 5 was famously labeled “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism.”

Its thunderous brass chords and relentless timpani rolls in the finale were once routinely played as unironic socialist triumphalism. Under Mäkelä, however, the brass gleaming from the Oslo orchestra reflects the sickly sheen of cold steel. The tempo is deliberately unyielding, hammer blow upon hammer blow, like nails driven into bone.

This is not celebration; this is a man with a pistol pressed to his temple, bleeding and ordered to dance on the public square shouting that he has never been happier. Mäkelä’s restraint makes the terror all the more inescapable.

The Meat Grinder of the Fourth and the Burlesque Sixth

If the Fifth represents a public survival strategy, the Fourth is the untamed leviathan.

A colossal orchestra of over one hundred musicians hurls itself into the central fugue of the first movement like an industrial meat grinder. The Oslo strings articulate the frantic counterpoint with surgical menace. And when the finale subsides, the celesta ticks over a pedal point in C minor for minutes on end, leaving the hall looking out upon a post-nuclear wasteland.

The Sixth then upturns all classical form: a sprawling, twenty-minute tragic Largo followed immediately by two manic, circus-like gallops.

Walking out into the evening after hearing this set, you can’t help glancing back over your shoulder. Music is not always meant to comfort us; sometimes it exists to bear witness to how humans kept breathing through the darkest hour.