Something happened to Shostakovich between his dazzlingly gifted First Symphony and his masterly, equivocal Fifth and that 'something' was more than the notorious clash with Stalin and the Soviet authorities over Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The Second and Third Symphonies (and, to a degree, the Fourth) are the smithy in which his mature symphonic style was forged. Both are 'unsatisfactory' works, the Third (a half-hour sequence of extremist and only tenuously connected gestures) even more so than the avowedly unsymphonic Second, but both contain the untempered and unrefined raw material from which masterpieces were to be made (or not to be made: the almost atonal counterpoint of the Second Symphony's introduction, angular lines emerging from the flux, offers a line of development that Shostakovich did not pursue). The Third Symphony's dazzling brightness, its exhausting vitality and almost directionless juxtapositions are quite a shock to the system, the ranting choral finales of both works will stick in many throats, but there is a powerful feeling throughout of mingled exultation and frustration as Shostakovich discovers capability after capability but searches as yet in vain for a sense of long-term direction.
Energy of breathtaking wildness, big tunes hurled to the horizon, biting irony and grotesque grimaces, huge oratory—they are all here, and so are impassioned eloquence and shadowed tension, but all piled in confusion. The only thing to do is to pitch it at the audience hot and strong, and performances don't come much hotter and stronger than these, all the more so for the vast melodramatic contrasts that CD allows. Not relaxing listening (though the comparative—if at times malicious—geniality of The Age of Gold suite comes as a welcome contrast), but crude creative energy, which both exhilarates and 9 tramples you flat.'