Despite the enthusiastic interest of Alexander Gauk, Prokofiev instead chose to have the Sixth's premiere conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, who was impressed by the symphony after the composer played it for him.

[6] During the rehearsals for the symphony, Prokofiev described to Mendelson, whom he had married in January, that the "reminiscences" heard near the finale's coda were "questions cast into eternity".

[10] After the concert, Mravinsky confided to Prokofiev and Mendelson that the performance of the symphony was marred by a number of instrumental mishaps which had left him unhappy and unable to sleep.

[11] In the weeks prior to the Sixth Symphony's world premiere, Prokofiev's biographer Nestyev and the music critic Grigori Schneerson [ru] complained that the composer was being "stingy" with explanations of a work they and the musicians of the Leningrad Philharmonic found difficult.

[16] He also described the finale as being "in the spirit of Mozart or Glinka", but that its cheerful mood was dispelled by the invasion of a "titan" whose "incessantly repeated fanfares" reawaken the tragic sonorities from earlier in the symphony.

[17] The music critic of Leningradskaya Pravda praised the symphony as "another stunning victory for Soviet art", adding that "the optimism of this [work], its strong-willed intonations, character, and lyricism reflect the many facets of our people".

[6] Musicologist Yulian Weinkop [ru] elicited Prokofiev's approval by comparing the symphony's opening to the scrape of a rusty key turning in a door lock, before revealing a "world of warmth, affection, and beauty".

[19] Nevertheless, the Sixth was among the works excoriated by Andrei Zhdanov and Tikhon Khrennikov the following year during their campaign against formalism in music.

[20] The latter lambasted what he perceived as its composer's inability to keep the symphony's "lively and limpid ideas" from being drowned in "contrived chaotic groanings",[21] ultimately dismissing it as a "failure".

[22] Nestyev reversed his earlier approval, now decrying the symphony as "clearly formalist", an about-face which Atovmyan openly criticized.

Aram Khachaturian listed it among the works in which he felt that the composer maintained his "guiding principle" of "service to his people, to mankind".

[27] While maintaining his previous criticisms of the symphony, Nestyev also wrote that it was "not only an important event in the creative history of an outstanding musician, but also a unique artistic monument of its time".

[30]The Sixth was sufficiently successful at its American premiere that Stokowski decided to reprogram it at a subsequent concert on December 6.

[33] A brief obituary for Prokofiev which was published in the spring 1953 issue of Tempo said that the Sixth's large-scale architecture and attempts at optimism "did not really suit his talent".

[34] However, another critic writing in the same magazine in 1970 called the Sixth the "great, crowning" work of Prokofiev's symphonic output.