Like its immediate forerunner, Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony revolves round a series of vocal settings. But whereas the earlier work used poems exclusively by Yevtushenko, the present symphony takes poems by writers as disparate as Apollinaire, Lorca and Rilke. And in this case the scoring is scaled down to chamber dimensions: two singers, with an orchestra of nineteen strings and percussion, including such tuned instruments as bells, vibraphone and xylophone, and the celesta as a delicate extra.