The Allegro movement from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 was intended as a musical portrait of the despotic Soviet leader, Stalin.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer, had a lifelong fondness for Nikolai Gogol, the 19th-century absurdist writer, and knew many of his pages by heart.
Composition History
The music on this album forms the soundtrack to the film "The Overcoat," which was adapted from a Vancouver Playhouse theatre production of a story by Nikolai Gogol.
Historical Context
Shostakovich's Jazz Suites were part of an effort to elevate jazz, which was viewed with suspicion in the Soviet Union as a product of Western bourgeois decadence.
Composition History
Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 was written for his son, Maxim, who premiered it on his nineteenth birthday at the Bolshoi Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.
Compositional Technique
Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1 features an unusual combination of a solo piano accompanied by a string orchestra and a single trumpet, which constantly vies for supremacy with the piano.
Composition History
After a denunciation of the arts in 1948, Shostakovich had his colleague Lev Atovmian arrange four ballet suites from music he had written in the happier 1930s, to sidestep demands for optimistic music.
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