Top Songs By Dmitri Shostakovich
More albums from Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich's Popular Music Videos
Shostakovich: Jazz Suite No. 2: VI. Waltz 2
Andris Nelsons & Vienna Philharmonic
Shostakovich: The Gadfly, Op. 97: III. Youth (Romance)
Esther Abrami, Ben Palmer & The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra
Dmitri Shostakovich: Fugue No. 7 in A Major, Op. 87
Igor Levit
Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93: II. Allegro (Live from Barbican)
Gianandrea Noseda & London Symphony Orchestra
String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73: I. Allegretto
Albion Quartet
Waltz from Pirogov (1947)
Dmitri Shostakovich
Ball at the Palace from Hamlet (1946)
Dmitri Shostakovich
Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 99: I. Nocturne. Moderato (Live at Suntory Hall, Tokyo / 2000)
Hilary Hahn, Berlin Philharmonic & Mariss Jansons
Shostakovich: Dance from The Gadfly (1955)
Dmitri Shostakovich, Russian Philharmonic Orchestra & Sergei Skripka
Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144: 1. Elegy. Adagio
Danish String Quartet
About Dmitri Shostakovich
Artist Biography
Something of a Russian wunderkind, Shostakovich in maturity was both an establishment figure and an artist who effectively became the conscience of Soviet music. Born to musical parents in 1906, he showed talent from an early age, impressing the director of the Petrograd Conservatory, Glazunov, to be admitted aged 13. In the fraught years immediately after the Revolution, Shostakovich supplemented his family’s income by working as a pianist accompanying silent films; the vivid vignettes and jump cuts of that medium are reflected in his early works, such as Symphony No. 1 (1925), which he completed at 19 and was quickly taken up by orchestras around the world. Shostakovich’s success continued until the government issued a denunciation in 1936, which greeted his previously successful opera Lady Macbeth (1932). The implicit threat this carried—at a time when thousands were being arrested and executed without trial—changed Shostakovich. His Symphony No. 5 (1937) and subsequent works express a fury and despair that he could not voice in public, although these works were often leavened with moments of sarcasm, irony and cheeky allusions to his own private life. Occasionally he directly challenged Soviet authorities, as in Symphony No. 13, “Babi Yar" (1962), which sets poems by Yevtushenko that commemorate the Jews massacred in the eponymous Ukrainian ravine and attack the Soviet system for its cynical abuse of its citizens. Nonetheless, when Shostakovich died in 1975, he was honoured as a “great Soviet artist”.
Hometown
St. Petersburg, Russia
Genre
Classical
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