Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5

Much of Shostakovich’s extraordinary output was profoundly marked by politics and the judgements of censors. His monumental Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest and most powerful of twentieth-century orchestral works was, supposedly, ‘A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism’. It is now known that this popular symphony was composed as a work of defiance so subtle that no-one realised at the time.