Shostakovich Symphony No. 11, "The Year 1905"
Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast
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Shostakovich: A Soviet Stooge
Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, considered music like this to be nothing but the work of a Soviet stooge. Now it's truly impossible to know what Shostakovich felt, since his memoir testimony has been discredited. But symphonies like this put him firmly in between being called a Soviet Stooge, or a secret dissident. He was both and neither at the same exact time.
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