Shostakovich Symphony No 8 album review – composer’s cry of despair in a remarkable and resonant new recording
Frankfurt Radio Symphony/Altinoglu (Alpha) Conductor Alain Altinoglu brings weight and purpose while the instrumental solos are piquant and precise. If the Leningrad was Shostakovich’s official response to the second world war, the Eighth Symphony was his answer to the question: “Will you tell us what you really think?” Written while the fighting was still under way, its immediacy remains striking today, a quality…
Key points
- Alain Altinoglu conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in a new recording of Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony.
- The album is released on the Alpha label and follows the conductor's accounts of the fourth and fifth symphonies last year.
- The review praises the performance's weight, purpose and precise instrumental solos.
A new recording of Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under conductor Alain Altinoglu, has been released on the Alpha label. The review describes the interpretation as purposeful and the playing as remarkable and resonant.
The Eighth Symphony was written while the second world war was still under way. The review says its immediacy remains striking today, a quality reflected in Altinoglu's reading.
A direct and weighty reading
The review notes that the strings dig deep, bringing remarkable colours to a 26-minute Adagio that can sound merely bleak in other hands. Altinoglu does not avoid the horrors: his phrasing and textural dynamics give fearsome weight and a sense of wide-eyed terror to what the review calls the composer's protracted cry of despair.
The orchestra's instrumental solos are described as piquant and precise. An outstanding German production team captures resonant details, and the review says the result outdoes the Berlin Philharmonic's 2020 account under Kirill Petrenko, adding that Shostakovich fans will need both.
Will you tell us what you really think?
— The Guardian
Later movements and series
The second movement, possibly a portrait of the Nazi war machine, and the third, with its visceral battlefield depiction, shriek with terror and, here and there, the blackest humour. The passacaglia that follows is a keening survey of what has come before, leading to a shellshocked finale that balances cynicism with compassion.
With persuasive accounts of the fourth and fifth symphonies released last year, the review says this is shaping up to be an important series.
