Les Jacobson writes in Evanston Roundtable: "On playing the Shostakovich 5th Symphony"
I’ve written about the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony before. It’s one of the masterworks of the classical repertoire, alongside the great symphonies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mahler. But it’s also a great deal more. A man’s life depended on this symphony. That man was the composer himself.