Symphony no. 8

Album by Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich & Berliner Philharmoniker & Kirill Petrenko

Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65 is the eighth symphony by Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, written and completed in 1943. The work is a large-scale, four-movement orchestral composition in the mid-20th-century Soviet classical tradition, characterised by sombre, brooding textures, dense orchestration and stark dramatic contrasts, and it occupies a pivotal place in Shostakovich's output as an intense, introspective response to the wartime period that helped shape his subsequent symphonic writing.