I ordered a copy of the Rostropovich/Oistrakh cello concertos disc too! Also the two piano concertos and the trio with the composer on piano. We can compare notes later.

"I'm curious which of the Symphonies you like Marie Therese? I've been lately infatuated with the old Stokowski recordings of the fifth and sixth. They aren't my favorites among his symphonies but the recording itself is interesting."

I haven't heard the Stowkowski recordings-may have to check those out. I've liked the relatively recent recordings of the Shostakovich symphonies by Simon Rattle. I think he has a good grasp on Shostakovich's general style but also manages to keep the bombast (and some of the symphonies, Nos. 7 and 14 for instance, really are terribly bombastic!) to a minimum. I'm not a huge fan of the orchestral symphonic form in general though (it took me nearly two decades to appreciate symphonic literature beyond Beethoven), so I'm probably not the best person to ask!

I do like the ballet and film music a lot though. So witty! And joyfully, unselfconsciously "low-brow".

Since we're on the subject of Shostakovich, I thought I'd post this link to an interesting article from January of this year in The Guardian: books.guardian.co.uk/review/...,00.html The author's comparison of Shostakovich' s reputation with Tchaikovsky's in an earlier era is interesting and, I think, pretty apt. I think these paragraphs (edited for brevity) are quite fascinating:

"At the heart of both Tchaikovsky's and Shostakovich's music is superlative technique and fluency, coupled with a pronounced fondness for mixing highbrow contexts, ideas and tunes with a sometimes startlingly lowbrow flavour...This combination of highbrow and kitsch is not theirs alone, of course. Many composers have joined in the fun, including Mozart, Schubert and Mahler. But Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich certainly shared a particularly distinctive addiction to brazen melodrama. In Tchaikovsky's case, this is rooted in his love of the popular boulevard operas of his day; Shostakovich looked to the equivalent artform in his own time, cinema. Their fondness for such material is often counterbalanced by suggestions of scorn, evasion or frustration.

There is an exhilarating element of playfulness at work here, but it also raises darker questions. If Stravinsky was right when he declared that taste was a moral category, then the play with vulgarity of both Tchaikovsky (whom Stravinsky loved) and Shostakovich (whom he did not) poses questions about their artistic honesty. Some listeners - myself included - find such ambiguity fascinating. Others are repelled. Nowadays, Tchaikovsky's reputation is probably faring better in this respect than Shostakovich's, mainly because he lived longer ago. The extraordinary repugnance shown towards Tchaikovsky's music by earlier commentators, usually increased by their prejudice against his homosexuality, has begun to slip away. Little by little...we have learned to see his vast, protean, endlessly unpredictable talent as something in itself, not flawless, not immune to serious critical thought, but the product of what we should have the courage to call genius. The research of scholars and musicologists in recent years has greatly helped to bring us closer to his music.

Unfortunately, with Shostakovich, the heavy work of clearing the scholarly undergrowth is only just beginning..."

Does anyone else like his preludes and fugues? They are some of the most successful 20th century ventures into this genre.