The fifth installment of John Storgårds’s Shostakovich symphony cycle with the BBC Philharmonic contains works written primarily during Shostakovich’s student years. The two orchestral scherzos on the program share links with the later First Symphony, which was composed as a graduation test in composition from the Petrograd Conservatoire. Shostakovich spent two years working on it and the Symphony he eventually produced was an instant success, marking him out among Soviet composers. Written four years later, the Third Symphony shows not only the rapid development of the composer, but the equally rapid change in the world he inhabited. He passed the newly required examination in Marxist ideology in December 1926 and extended his registration as a postgraduate student at Leningrad Conservatoire until early 1930. He submitted the symphony with the explanation that it “expresses the festive spirit of peaceful construction,” already demonstrating his realization that political spin would be crucial to his creative survival.