Following their electrifying account of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony (8.572082), Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra explore the profound ambivalences of the composer’s most performed symphony, the Fifth, written in 1937 at a time when he was under intense personal and political pressure from the authorities. The jaunty, neo-classical character of the Ninth Symphony (1945) prompted Shostakovich to remark that ‘musicians will like to play it, and critics will delight in blasting it’. Shostakovich’s startlingly different original draft for the opening of the Ninth’s first movement is available on 8.572138.