Dmitri Shostakovich Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images. When Dmitri Shostakovich announced he’d written a 15th Symphony, his fans might have expected another excursion into darkness.

Shostakovich’s chameleon-like creative personality makes him impossible to tie down. Take his knockabout Piano Concerto No.1, which throws virtually everything into the stylistic melting pot – ...

Dmitri Shostakovich's most famous work, the Fifth Symphony, reflects his tenuous position as a creative artist in a repressive state. But the composer's overall contributions were stunningly diverse.

Shostakovich pretended to be dismissive of it, claiming it had “no redeeming artistic merits.” He believed no such thing. He played, conducted, and recorded it repeatedly. At the end of the last ...

Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , was a hit in Russia until the night Stalin walked out on a Bolshoi performance. Then things soured in a hurry.

Shostakovich’s stock took a conspicuous leap in 1979 with the publication in the U.S. of “Testimony,” purporting to be the composer’s memoirs as told to, and smuggled to the West by ...

Forty years after the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, Clemency Burton-Hill looks back at his difficult career in the USSR – and some surprising facts you might not know. On 9 August it will be 40 ...

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on September 25, 1906. Years after his death, he remains one of the most important figures in 20th-century classical music and one of the ...

But next to Wolfgang Amadeus, Nelsons would also offer up a more controversial choice: Dmitri Shostakovich. For a decade, Nelsons has been exploring Shostakovich with the BSO.

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich died in 1975 without completing his dream of setting Anton Chekhov’s short story, “The Black Monk,” as an opera.