Performers
Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Kurt Sanderling (conductor)

In this straightforward but utterly riveting programme, German conductor Kurt Sanderling rehearses with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, as he guides us through the real meanings of one of the most popular of 20th-century symphonies - Dmitri Shostakovich's No 5 in D minor.

The symphony has the reputation, rightly, as the one which saved the composer's life. Shostakovich - a fast-rising star of the musical world, with his modernist and realist opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk proving a hit - was on Stalin's death list. Sanderling explains the reasons why, with grim humour. The composer slept with a bag packed, expecting the 4am knock on the door from the Secret Police and day. But Stalin, almost toying with the young man, gave Shostakovich a lifeline: to compose a symphony in praise of the Russian "people" (ie regime). He did so - and being Shostakovich, wrote a monumentally moving work of great power, a paean to the rulers which saved his life - yet which was also a thinly disguised and bitter attack on them.

Sanderling knew Shostakovich fairly well, especially later in the composer's life, and was present at the historic 1937 premiere of the Fifth (when the slow movement, a profoundly moving lament for those who died in the Terror, had the entire audience weeping for the friends they had lost). In this programme he goes through parts of the work phrase by phrase, explaining in detail how they caricature the activities of the regime.

For example... the second movement, Sanderling explains, is a parody of the entertainments laid on for party members: all of "Soviet culture" brutally edited into a one-hour fest: rehearsed-out Cossack dancing, soulless brass bands, the simpering little girl with her memorised speech praising the man with the big moustache... the lot, all lampooned in Shostakovich's parade.

Sanderling talks in interview about the composer he knew, illuminated by archive footage. One rarely-seen extract is telling: Shostakovich at some official meeting, giving a formulaic speech in his high-pitched voice about art for the people, blah blah blah. He talks as he played the piano in public - nervously, too fast, wiry, jumpy - and it's clear that he means none of it, but is going through the motions because he cannot afford otherwise.

A superb programme that should not be missed by anyone who cares about Shostakovich's searingly powerful music.
One amusing little detail to watch out for: after Sanderling has talked, fascinatingly, at length on the background behind one part of the symphony, he prepares to play it with the orchestra - only to be told that it's time for a statutory break. The difference between regimes - the brutal oppression of a police state on the one hand and the benign social democracy of a postwar northern European country on the other - could hardly be put better.