The musical and political strands of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life were intertwined like the braids of a noose. Dmitri Shostakovich was a coward. Or at least the great Soviet composer admitted as much to ...

In the eye of Russia’s revolutionary storm, he wrote some of the most powerful – and cryptic – music of the 20th century. Whether he is judged a Soviet lackey or heroic dissident, the wealth of his ...

It was 100 years ago that Dmitri Shostakovich, as a young music student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, completed his First Symphony. He finished the work in April 1925, and did not turn 19 years ...

Shostakovich has been as misunderstood as his great opera was. It’s time to stop viewing both the man and his works through the lens of Stalinism Dmitri Shostakovich probably had a bad feeling already ...