Berliner Philharmoniker / Sir Simon Rattle

The works were composed between 1934 and 1940 – musical messages from a dark Europe, written in different places, with different intentions. Music from the underground, music of resistance – an outcry reverberating for a long time – and, as its centrepiece, a symphony that presents, in a series of opposing sound scenes, its inner nature to its epoch. For his Fourth, Shostakovich demands a huge orchestra – gigantic, like everything that was considered modern in the Soviet Union. He divides the one-hour work into three movements – like the acts of a drama – which know no areas of rest; even when they quieten down and slowly move on, the tension remains. He writes music with physical presence, including scene-changes, cuts, and (cross-) fades: a drama as an audio film.