Ah, the Russians! In 1934, the tumultuous succès de scandal of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk put Dmitri Shostakovich in the crosshairs of Stalin’s Pravda. But on November 21, 1937, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor, op. 47, premiered to cheers that lasted well over half an hour. Even the critics loved it—so much so that officialdom got the jitters. And not without cause. Ever under a political microscope, Shostakovich is widely believed to have encrypted many subversive messages in his music. Let’s see what implications we divine in the interpretation of the octogenarian Leonard Slatkin, a lifelong Shostakovich champion. Slatkin’s program also includes, more newsworthily, the local premiere of the octogenarian New Yorker John Corigliano’s whizbang 30-minute concerto Triathlon, first heard in San Francisco in 2020. Unusually if not indeed uniquely, the soloist Timothy McAllister, for whom Corigliano wrote the piece, plays different instruments in each movement. The soprano sax dispatches the buoyant acrobatics of the opening “Leaps.” The serenity of the ensuing “Lines” is entrusted to the alto sax. The baritone sax, which Corigliano loves for its “sassy, gravelly” sound, takes over for the finale, entitled “Licks,” which isn’t a jazz movement even if the title suggests otherwise. —Matthew Gurewitsch