Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10, Op. 93

“The terrible face of Stalin” shines in the second movement, Dmitri Shostakovich’s son Maxim had said about his father’s Tenth Symphony. Conductor Tugan Sokhiev, together with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, is now making this musical act of violence audible as part of his Shostakovich series, which began in 2020 The Russian conductor recently resigned both as chief conductor of Moscow’s famed Bolshoi Theater and as leader of the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, with which he realized the current recording. Pressed for a political statement in light of the Ukraine war, Tugan Sokhiev retorted, ‘The fact that anyone can question my commitment to peace and think that I, as a musician, can ever stand up for anything other than peace on our planet is shocking and insulting.'” Increasingly, he says, he is faced with the ‘impossible choice’ of deciding between the two musical traditions, European and Russian. The choice of the work can be understood there as an indirect statement: After years of silence, Dmitri Shostakovich again ventured to write a symphony, his tenth, in 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death. In it, the composer works through a dictator whose regime of terror had left him frozen in fear of death for many years. In brute march rhythms and allusions to Mussorgsky’s opera about the terror ruler Boris Godunov, he gives him form. In the finale, however, Shostakovich’s initials cast in notes triumph.