Chamber music effects abound with, for instance, piccolo or flute, eerily alone or accompanied by the B-flat clarinets.
Note, too, the composer's wonderful spotlighting of the melancholy English horn, a lone figure after the din has evaporated.
[3] Music critic Daniel Hathaway noted that "Snare drums ratcheted up the riot of brutal sound in the Scherzo and references to the William Tell Overture and laughing trombones added a hilarious burlesque quality to the finale.
Speaking in a later radio address in January 1939, he announced that he was "getting ready to write" the Sixth Symphony, but made no mention of Lenin or Mayakovsky’s poem.
The concert was part of a 10-day festival of Soviet music that included performances of Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, Yuri Shaporin’s On the Field of Kulikovo, and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.
Leonid Entelis [uk] lauded the symphony in his review, predicting a bright future for it, and praising Shostakovich for his continued progress away from formalistic tendencies.