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Music: Shostakovich Symphony No. 7

Sublime Shostakovich tribute to a hero city under siege

Shostakovich Symphony No. 7

'Leningrad'

Barbican Centre, London EC2

5 Stars

The Leningrad Symphony has been used as a political football almost from its inception and continues to be so.

Those rabidly hostile to the Soviet Union claim that its composer Dmitri Shostakovich was a talentless stooge of Stalin, whereas liberal oppositionists have hailed him as a sublime critic of the Soviet system and closet dissident.

They're wrong on both counts.

Shostakovich wrote the first three movements in Leningrad very rapidly just before and during the siege in 1941. "War was all around," he wrote. "I had to be with the people. I wanted to create the image of our country at war, capture it in music."

He made it clear that his was not a naturalistic representation of war. He wanted to "convey the content of terrifying events" and the central part of the symphony's first movement is occupied by a requiem "for the heroes who died for us."

For Shostakovich the war against invading nazi hordes was part of a broader defence of the October Revolution.

He completed the fourth movement while an evacuee in Kuybishev and - a morale-boosting masterstroke - the score was flown from there to Leningrad for a historic concert on August 9, 1942 at the city's Philharmonic Hall.

The Red Army command kept the artillery silent for the duration and broadcast the concert in the direction of nazi trenches.

As a native of Leningrad, whose mother survived the 872-day siege, conductor Semyon Bychkov believes he has a "genetic" affinity with the Seventh. Such words seemed to have cast a spell on the BBC Symphony Orchestra as, along with Bychkov, they appeared to be submerged in a cathartic trance while delivering this breathtaking performance.

On the night, the symphony was liberated from the historic patina of anti-Sovietism. The sublime music was allowed to eloquently and engrossingly speak for itself.

Its dynamics, thrillingly realised here, shift from the meditative mood of the first movement to the sombre orchestration of the second and third as the crescendo of turmoil advances, almost imperceptibly growing in strength and volume.

The broad canvas of confrontation unfurls in the fourth movement and as it intensifies the audience, orchestra and conductor seem swept up in a collective elation that culminates in the closing minutes when the tones of victory - almost celebratory - become ever more audible.

There's a stunned silence at the last note and then a five-minute standing ovation erupts. Unforgettable.

The symphony is available for download on BBC Radio 3 iPlayer www.bbc.co.uk/radio until the end of the week.

Krystyna Zavisha

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