Part b

John Storgårds’s acclaimed series of Shostakovich symphonies continues with this recording of Symphony No. 13. The BBC Philharmonic is joined by the bass-baritone Albert Dohmen and the Estonian National Male Choir. The symphony, subtitled ‘Babiy Yar’, caused a great deal of tension and controversy in the lead-up to its première, in December 1962 – not because of the music, but the poetry. Shostakovich had chosen to set Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Babiy Yar. Ostensibly an outraged response to the lack of a memorial for the thousands of Jews murdered by the Nazis and dumped in a ravine near Kyiv, the poem implicitly criticised the anti-Semitism then still rife in the Soviet Union.

John Storgårds’s acclaimed series of Shostakovich symphonies continues with this recording of Symphony No. 13. The BBC Philharmonic is joined by the bass-baritone Albert Dohmen and the Estonian National Male Choir. The symphony, subtitled ‘Babiy Yar’, caused a great deal of tension and controversy in the lead-up to its première, in December 1962 – not because of the music, but the poetry. Shostakovich had chosen to set Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Babiy Yar. Ostensibly an outraged response to the lack of a memorial for the thousands of Jews murdered by the Nazis and dumped in a ravine near Kyiv, the poem implicitly criticised the anti-Semitism then still rife in the Soviet Union.