Shostakovich - Symphony No. 10 (Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti) 

I think you have confused popularity with greatness. While the 5th certainly is a great symphony, no10 is by general consensus by those who are familiar with all his best works as Shostakovich’s finest symphony.

"One can grow intellectually and emotionally with Shostakovich's music"... so perfectly said. That is how I recognize human potential .. if one stays with 2nd waltz because it is a pretty music from Stalin's movie, that person has never grown to appreciate the gamut of feelings and emotions, one who started with the waltz and slowly understood other works and graduated to Dmitri's symphonies is the person with emotional depth.

@@BytomGirl I absolutely agree with you. Only when music stimulates all the senses is it good music for me. Of course, Shostakovich also composed trivialities, more or less to earn money or pass the time, which certainly includes the jazz suites from which this waltz is taken. His symphonies or the two cello concertos are made of completely different stuff. You have to be awake, empathise and question what levels what we hear really has. And, as Clytemnestra sings so beautifully in Strauss' Elektra - "what the truth is, no man can bring out". That is true art.

I've always said that if you want to get a feel for how it was like to live in Stalin's USSR, you can read Solzhenitsyn...or listen to this symphony.

Mine too. By far !

Not yet at least :(