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The New Collected Works of Dmitri Shostakovich
- 25 Jun 2024
Dmitri Shostakovich
• Orchestral Score
• Revised and corrected new editions of Symphony No. 4, No. 7, No. 8, No. 10 and No. 13
• Large format study scores for optimal legibility
Symphony No 4
The fateful Pravda article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ appeared in January 1936, in which Shostakovich was directly attacked for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, at which point the composer had completed about half of his Symphony No. 4. Although the new score already demonstrated the particularly criticised characteristics such as intellectualism, remoteness from the people, incomprehensibility and the like, Shostakovich continued to write his Fourth undeterred. However, a few days before the planned premiere in December 1936, Shostakovich decided to withdraw the new work and thus narrowly avoided an official ban. It was not until 1961 that Symphony No. 4 was finally premiered in Moscow under the direction of Kirill Kondrashin.
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Symphony No 7
While the German Wehrmacht besieged Leningrad, Shostakovich wrote his ‘Leningrad’ Symphony. More than a million people died during the 28-month-long isolation of the city. Against this backdrop, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 became a symbol for the trapped Leningraders of their solidarity and will to survive. At its premiere and even more so at its first Leningrad performance on 9 August 1942, while the city was still under siege, the symphony was greeted with euphoric enthusiasm. The commentator at the live radio broadcast described the concert: "The whole hall stood up during the finale. You couldn't stay seated and listen. It was impossible."
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Symphony No 8
Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8 was composed within a period of only a few weeks in 1943. Its unusual formal structure, with five very unevenly balanced movements, was not the only thing to alienate the critics at first: above all, the expected triumphant final movement was missing, which would have symbolised the turning point of the on-going war after the Battle of Stalingrad. While it was officially agreed that this symphony reflected the horror of war, the conductor Kurt Sanderling, a friend of Shostakovich, said that it was a representation of the "horror of an intellectual's life at that time".
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Symphony No 10
Nine months after Stalin's death on 10 December 1953, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 was premiered as his first symphonic composition since the end of the war. It was later interpreted by Solomon Volkov as a coded description of Stalin and the years of his regime. Although the music can certainly be understood in that sense – both in the extremely carefully composed first movement and in the brutal Scherzo which is claimed to be a portrait of Stalin – such an interpretation has remained controversial to this day. What is clear is that this dark work contains not only allusions to compositions by Mahler and Sibelius, but also frequent and richly varied appearances of Shostakovich’s own monogram, DSCH, and that of one of his students Elmira Nazirova.
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Symphony No 13
In September 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem ‘Babi Yar’ appeared in the Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta, addressing the mass shooting in 1941 of more than 33,000 Jewish men, women and children on the outskirts of Kyiv by the city’s German occupiers. Deeply moved by the poem, Shostakovich took it as the starting point for his Symphony No. 13 for bass, male choir, and orchestra. The work was premiered on 18 December 1962 at the sold-out Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, despite resistance and intimidation from the political leadership which sought to avoid such an explicit reference to Jewish suffering. The first performance, which was acclaimed by the audience, was mentioned in Pravda the next day with only a brief single sentence.
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