'Origin Story: Shostakovich and Stalin – The Composer and the Dictator'

15 August 2025

2025 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. I’m currently preparing to take part in a Northampton Symphony Orchestra weekend workshop at the end of August which will see an orchestra of nearly 120 players tackling Shostakovich’s massive ‘Symphony No 4’. And next week I’m going to see the Aurora Orchestra performing Shostakovich’s ‘Symphony No 5’ (from memory) at the Edinburgh International Festival. So I’ve been reading a lot about Shostakovich and the extraordinary challenges he faced as a composer in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. I particularly enjoyed a recent episode of the ‘Origin Story’ podcast on ‘Shostakovich and Stalin – The Composer and the Dictator’. Presenters Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt give an overview of Shostakovich’s life in a clear, accessible way which doesn’t require much knowledge of classical music. They refer to Julian Barnes’ novel about Shostakovich, 'The Noise of Time' (which I reviewed here in March 2016) and Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film ‘The Death of Stalin’. They also tell the incredible tale of the first performance of Shostakovich’s ‘Symphony No 7’ in the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall during the siege of Leningrad in 1942, which I learned about when I played the Leningrad Symphony with Northampton Symphony Orchestra in 2013 (reviewed here in November 2013). You can listen to the podcast here.