Shostakovich on Trial: from Lady Macbeth to the Fifth Symphony

This lecture focuses on one of the watershed moments of Soviet music history: the censure of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and the composer’s path through reform to rehabilitation. The Shostakovich story was only the tip of the iceberg, and almost all Soviet composers had to adjust their aesthetic and style at this point, unless they were prepared to languish in obscurity and poverty. Shostakovich's Songs on the Texts of English Poets is performed by Bass Ed Hawkins an...