The importance of Dmitry Shostakovich as an influence in the history of classical music is hard to understate. Marking the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth, Performance Today begins a week of ...

Shostakovich may have secreted a subversive cipher beneath the surface of his life-saving Symphony No. 5. This is all the more shocking since another bad review from ...

I was fulsome in my praise of Stokowski’s VW Eighth on its initial release on BBC Radio Classics (4/96 – nla). Hearing it again has merely reinforced my admiration for a performance of such abundant ...

Contrasting symphonies by the brilliant but troubled Dmitri Shostakovich get deluxe treatments from conductor Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony. Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after ...

An apology or an act of defiance? Shostakovich composed his Fifth Symphony in 1937 after receiving an official reprimand from the Soviet Union, responding with one of the most powerful — and enigmatic ...

Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1, 5 and 7 (“Leningrad”); Prelude in E-flat minor Philadelphia Orchestra, NBC Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, conductor (Pearl, 2-CD set). It was Leopold Stokowski ...

From the exuberance of a fiesta to expressions of profound despair, the Hong Kong Philharmonic hit the mark at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on Good Friday. Returning after last year’s Sibelius and ...

On Jan. 28, 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich woke up to read a sternly worded condemnation of his music in the official Soviet newspaper, Pravda. Never mind that the work in question (his opera “Lady Macbeth ...

Resusci Anne: 'My father invented the CPR dummy after I nearly drowned'—Resusci Anne: the world’s first life-saving resuscitation dummy ...

The major success of Andris Nelsons’ still brief career as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director must be his advocacy of the orchestral music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Certainly no BSO ...

It was one of the more striking moments of Riccardo Muti’s tenure as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director. Standing before a packed Orchestra Hall – and surrounded by a huge contingent of CSO ...