Dmitri Shostakovich is considered one of the great composers of the 20th century, and one of the greatest of all Russian musicians. Noted for versatility of style, his work includes 15 symphonies, string quartets, concertos, but also operas, ballets, and a number of works composed for theatre and cinema.
His work also became the soundtrack of the Soviet Union and its turbulent existence, first under Stalin's terror and later Nazi invasion.
He grew up in the doomed world of the upper middle class, bourgeois intelligentsia in St Petersburg. His father was a chemical engineer. His mother was a piano teacher.
A schoolboy when the Bolsheviks seized power, he came to survive life in the Soviet Union until the Brezhnev years, despite denunciation, threat of execution, rehabilitation, a second denunciation, and the death of his father, and eventual conscription into the party. His popularity in the West, because of his second fall from grace, has only continued since his death, and today his popularity has never been greater.
In this episode, Ed West is talking to his co-host, Paul Morland, about the life and times of an artist close to his heart.