For the second installment of their Rachmaninoff symphonies cycle for EMI, Vasily Petrenko and his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra cover the most popular and significant of the corpus, the Second Symphony in E minor. Also to the disc added the three delightful fragments from Rachmaninoff's early opera Aleko (1892) – The Women's Dance, Intermezzo and the Men's Dance – are offered as appetizer.

"Pas de Deux" is the first classical work from Academy Award-winning composer James Horner (Titanic, Avatar). The Concerto for Violin and Cello was commissioned and performed by the brother and sister duo of Mari (violin) and Hakon (cello) Samuelsen with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. The album is completed with works by Pärt, Sollima and Einaudi that pair with Horner’s post-minimalist soundscape.

If you regard Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony as a decadent, nostalgic remnant of Czarist Russia, then you really should hear this performance. The music couldn’t sound fresher, lighter, or more modern. It’s not that Vasily Petrenko slights those lush, romantic elements, but he certainly doesn’t dwell on them either. As for the rest of the disc, the presence of Vocalise was inevitable, but the Caprice bohémien is a delightful work, far too little known, and it’s as splendidly played as the symphony. EMI’s engineers do everyone proud. This is definitely a distinctive view of Rachmaninov, a breath of fresh air, and a nice complement to more traditional approaches.

Vasily Petrenko flawlessly guides the Liverpool Philharmonic through every twist, turn and climax in Shostakovich’s remarkable Symphony No. 4 on this critically acclaimed album, recorded in 2013. The composer’s characteristic pathos and intensity pervade the piece, drawing the listener into an inner world of Soviet-era turmoil. Audiophilia included this album on its list of the 15 Star Recordings of the year.

Another volume in the highly acclaimed complete cycle of Dmitry Shostakovich symphonies from conductor Vasily Petrenko, leading the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on the Seventh Symphony, written during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Initially the composer gave each movement a programmatic title but later withdrew them, leaving this epic work as an historic emblem of heroic defiance in the face of conflict and crisis.

The seventh entry in Vasily Petrenko's outstanding sequence of Shostakovich symphonies pairs two works that stand at opposing poles of Shostakovic's creative life but present similar interpretive puzzles. The 2nd Symphony, written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, begins with music as modernistic as anything Shostakovich ever wrote but ends in a bombastic choral setting of Leninist agitprop poetry. The 15th Symphony, the composer's last, swerves from an almost giddy sense of play to death-haunted musings to a bleak serenity; along the way Shostakovich mixes in enigmatic allusions to Rossini and Wagner. In both pieces, esteem for the music sits alongside bafflement at what these pieces mean, and what they say about the composer's elusive inner life.

At its première in June 1969 Shostakovich described his Symphony No. 14, in effect a symphonic song cycle, as ‘a fight for the liberation of humanity… a great protest against death, a reminder to live one’s life honestly, decently, nobly…’ Originally intending to write an oratorio, Shostakovich set eleven poems on the theme of mortality, and in particular early or unjust death, for two solo singers accompanied by strings and percussion. This is the penultimate release in Vasily Petrenko’s internationally acclaimed symphonic cycle.

Petrenko’s Tchaikovsky promises to be one of the most important orchestral releases of 2017. Universal praise from reviewers for the first volume of Symphonies 1, 2 and 5 bodes well for this eagerly-awaited release: Gramophone gave Volume One an Editor’s choice and it reigned as a top 10 UK Classical chart title for 7 weeks in 2016.