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The argument could be made that Valery Gergiev and his Kirov orchestra’s 2002 recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies on Philips is the ne plus ultra of Shostakovich recordings.

Valery Gergiev holds the opening movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 together by sheer willpower. Since the gargantuan movement sprawls like a drunken giant, lurching from pseudo-exposition through inchoate development and faux-recapitulation and amorphous coda

By its very nature, patriotism is vulgar: loud and proud, bombastic and sentimental, and wholeheartedly simple-minded. Or is that less a description of patriotism than a précis of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7?

The trend in the 21st century has been to let the suppressed emotions detailed in the still-controversial Shostakovich memoir Testimony spill over into performances of his music, and this is all to the good: the emotional core of Shostakovich’s music is the experience of living under repression at a fundamental level.

Known in the United States primarily as the conductor of a surefire recording of Orff’s Carmina Burana, Herbert Kegel was respected in Europe as a pivotal figure in establishing the works of such individual Modernists as Blacher, Dallapiccola, Dessau, Penderecki, and Nono in the concert hall and on discs.

Schumann once posed the question wither sonata form after Beethoven? The older master’s innovations in his late sonatas, quartets, and symphonies had redefined the sonata, taking it to its apogee as a form but also, Schumann feared, to a point of no return.