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The story of Soviet music-making and the complex creative choreography it demanded from Dmitri Shostakovich is the inspiration behind Under Stalin’s Shadow, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s revelatory series of albums for Deutsche Grammophon conducted by its Music Director Andris Nelsons. Their latest recording, set for release on 22 February 2019, presents Shostakovich’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies together with the composer’s Suite from the Incidental Music to King Lear and the Festive Overture. Its predecessor, a compelling pairing of the Fourth and Eleventh Symphonies, was the winner of the Best Orchestral Performance and Best Engineered Album, Classical categories for the 2019 Grammy Awards. Both symphonies on their latest release date from a time of war, as does the incidental music from King Lear also included here. Nelsons sets the tone for his new album, whose contents were recorded live in concerts at Boston’s Symphony Hall in February, April and May 2017, with a deeply unsettling account of the Sixth Symphony’s opening movement. He and his Boston musicians cultivate a sense of danger from the music’s darkness, which only magnifies the subsequent irony of the second movement’s triple-time dance and the edginess of the finale. Their interpretation of the Seventh Symphony mixes dignity and menace, nostalgia for a lost world of peace and rage at the mechanised slaughter of civilians. Andris Nelsons was born in November 1978 in Riga, capital of what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia. Lenin and the dogma of dialectical materialism still governed the school curriculum and society was still haunted by a sense of fear, even if times had changed considerably since the period of Stalinism experienced by Shostakovich, whose music he grew up listening to on records in the family home and began playing at the age of five or six. The Boston Symphony’s Shostakovich tradition also runs deep. The orchestra gave the Boston premiere of the Sixth Symphony on 20 March 1942 under Serge Koussevitzky at Symphony Hall. Koussevitzky then gave the American concert premiere of the Seventh Symphony with the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra at Tanglewood on 14 August 1942, in a special performance to raise funds for Russian War Relief, following that with an extended series of Boston Symphony performances of the Seventh at home and on tour that October, November, and December.