Something very special is happening in Liverpool, if these thrilling new Shostakovich recordings are typical of the Petrenko effect on the RLPO. Last year, Naxos issued the first volume of a promised complete symphony cycle with a broadly conceived, epic account of the pictorial 11th — a narrative of the 1905 October revolution and its bloody outcome — and now here are Petrenko’s accounts of the popular Fifth and the perplexing Ninth, which are even finer still. Given the frequency with which the Fifth, arguably Shostakovich’s most popular symphony, is performed, Petrenko’s achievement is astonishing. Naxos’s recording is outstandingly clear, and the playing is world class. Petrenko adopts measured, but intensely sustained, tempi in the opening moderato and the expansive largo, and he is at pains to reveal the pain and anguish that lie beneath the surface of Shostakovich’s most self-consciously accessible symphony — “A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism,” the composer called it, but it conceals a samizdat of grief and despair, despite the finale’s hollow triumphalism. If the Fifth is his Beethoven homage, the Ninth is its antithesis, a perky tribute to Haydn in the manner of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony. Only in the brief largo — with duetting woodwinds spinning out long songs of lamentation — is the predominantly sardonic tone of the work tempered, and Petrenko captures its black-humoured irony to perfection. Even at full price these performances would be desirable additions to a collection. At Naxos’s, they are an unmissable bargain.

Naxos 8572167

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