Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Each successive hearing of the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony, on CD or (all too rarely) in the concert hall, prompts a ...

1 Watch the Premiere of Next On Stage: Season 6 2 ICYMI: Watch the Next On Stage: Season 6 Premiere Presented as part of Carnegie Hall's Voices of Hope Festival, Andris Nelsons leads the BSO in a 2018 ...

If all 15 of Shostakovich’s symphonies pose their problems and enigmas, the Fourth is particularly difficult to pin down and perform convincingly. Its vast structural edifice can appear unwieldy 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 ...

After a Chicago Symphony rehearsal on Wednesday, a violinist strode towards me and two CSO representatives as we chatted in the aisle. She had something to say to the press, she declared. She had been ...

In this immensely powerful wartime symphony, Shostakovich looks beyond the anguish of violence, in search of hope and renewal. During the summer of 1943, Shostakovich worked on his Eighth Symphony at ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Forty years ago Haitink was a prolific visitor to the recording studio, and it is testimony to his stature as a ...

Stephen Johnson explores Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4, written at the height of the antagonism towards the composer's music, from Stalin himself. Show more Shostakovich was in the middle of writing ...

The year’s celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Dmitri Shostakovich are unlikely to revive a work more unusual than this, the composer’s two-piano arrangement of his greatest and most ...