Thank you for doing that. It was really great.

@@ytnelsongn :)

fantastic performance! being inside this beast for over an hour must have been incredible ❤

Shame they had to use it for politcal pro EU propaganda.

@@dewolff6937 what do you mean ? do you know the history of this symphony ? i don't believe in europe only for money... i believe in a cutlural and hopeness like "contrat social" from rousseau and implemented by robespierre... please let me know if this video is translate for english-speaker (subhead or versionning) kzfaq.info/get/bejne/lbd8ocVqptDVcmg.html "les jeunes gens que je vois jouer là sont extraordinaires ! ils donnent la meilleure version de cette symphonie dont, quand j'avais 12 ans nous avions commandé la partition avec mon frère... nous avons mis 1 an et 6 mois pour l'obtenir... à croire que les bureaux du kremlin l' avait enterrée !!!! cela dit je suis profondémment marxiste, anarchiste, et pour moi le plus engagé que toute la planète ait pu avoir vers ces mouvements est "jesus christ" !!!! (disont évidemment que c'est lui et son héritage qui les a propulsé.) ce que les riches ont fait de "christ" de robespierre du communisme ou de sankara est une honte : ils ont unifié les peuples et les ont fortifié. les "possédants" ne font que diviser pour mieux asservir... tant pis pour eux, de leur existence, il ne récolteront qu'horreur, maléfice "bad vibes" et surtout : jamais la grâce , jamais de réelles jouissances ! merci chosta , tu es un héros !

@@dewolff6937 what is eu propaganda ? i mean europa keep a shit while it's only for capitalism. europa must be the thing for schiller's word, beethoven music... chosta is the children of it ... across schuman, brahms tchaikowski mahler

@@fatromb ew a French. Go eat a quasson or something.

I have to agree , his tenth and eleventh with Liverpool Philarmonic are very good too

m t anderson wrote a historical novel about it called symphony for the city of dead, the book is terrifying and excellent and explains how i found this video

@@stirlingalexander9543 actually the novel is (apparantely) about the Leningrad symphony, but both symphonies share some similarities

@@technik-lexikon the intention of Shostakovich when he created the 5 and the 7 was to make it different from the 4th. Both the 5 and 7 squared nicely with expectations of Soviet critiques while the 4th did not. I agree the 4th is one of his most beautiful.

@@stirlingalexander9543 I'm a child of that epoch and I can't see how anything like "death" could be related to this symphony. I think you are confusing something badly. City of Dead? At the time of the 4th symphony? Who is Anderson? Any relationship to Solomon Volkov by chance?

In September 1941, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history-almost three years of bombardment and starvation. Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, writing a symphony to rouse, rally, eulogize, and commemorate his fellow citizens: the Leningrad Symphony. This is the true story of a city under siege, the triumph of bravery and defiance in the face of terrifying odds. It is also a look at the power-and layered meaning-of music in beleaguered lives. Symphony for the City of the Dead is a masterwork thrillingly told and impeccably researched by National Book Award-winning author M. T. Anderson.@@YThome7

Agree, many tend to see sarcasm, some emphasize elements of parody or start looking for coded political statements. I agree with you, there is much more variety including lyricism.

Noe Berengena same thing had happened to me, and then eventually just came back from St. Petersburg a week ago. Greatest art forever!

In Shostakovich's memoir "Testimony", page 118, he comments on his life during the time composing the Symphony #4. "I was completely in the thrall of fear. I was no longer the master of m life, my past was crossed out, my work, my abilities, turned out to be worthless to everyone. The future didn't look any less bleak. At that moment I desperately wanted to disappear, it was the only possible way out. I thought of the possibility with relish." And a few paragraphs later, he says, "Some of these thoughts you can find, if you wish, in my Fourth Symphony. In the last pages, it's all set out rather precisely. Those thoughts were also present in my mind later, when I was writing the first part of the Sixth symphony. But the Sixth had a much happier fate than the Fourth. It was played right away and criticized moderately. The Fourth was played twenty-five years after it was written. . . Symphonies aren't Chinese eggs, you know." -- that is, they shouldn't lie in the ground waiting their time. On page 135, "And the truth is that the war helped. The war brought great sorrow and made life very, very hard. Much sorrow, many tears. But it had been even harder before the war, because then everyone was alone in his sorrow." -- speaking of 1936. "It suffocated me too. I had to write about it, I felt that it was my responsibility, my duty. I had to write a requiem for all those who died, who had suffered. I had to describe the horrible extermination machine and express protest against it."

@@benL8417 So after so many years you still believe Volkov? Personality of Shostakovich was such that he would be "completely in the thrall of fear" no matter where or when he would live. The genius was always rather insecure even though he quickly learned how to pull strings when it was necessary to help his son Maxim. The Fourth is my favorite, sounds to me like the last tribute to Proletkult, somewhat mechanical as it was expected to be for a futurist music piece.

John Gesselberty the 15th string quartet for me is his most devastating piece

@ The End: Agreed. The first time I heard the Serenade I felt like someone was cutting my sould into pieces with a spoon and started to weep uncontrollably. It was so strange, I had never reacted to any music that strongly before.

Odd? This and his 13th Symphony have much in common.

You're right!

I suppose you are familiar with Shostakovich's metronome markings? Funny that Kondrashin, Ormandy et al should have just ignored them.

@@2alberich2 On my PDFs of the scores they are right there although this is slower than Kondrashin played it with the Moscow. Best performance on any D.S. symphony other than Kondrashin and/or Mravinsky is Barshai"s performance of the 4th with the WDR, IMO. All tempos, all moods, are spot on. Terror where needed, satire where needed, great performance.

i think we can also add Gergiev to those few who follow the author's remarks. He plays coda very invasively and powerfully , compensating with half-minute pause when it's over.

@@ediccartman7252 Neeme Jarvi also plays it at tempo , if you want an authentic performance he is a go to . Personally I like the slower coda , in which Rostropovich , who also knows the composer does . Another great recording with a slower coda is Previn

Aren't you surprised that Stalin, a person without any musical education, without any systemic education, would listen to symphonies, to classic music at all? I can imagine Molotov would, but Stalin? Isn't it strange?

not really...... he's just putting his own ego & power up against artistic geniuses, saying, I control you geniuses too, I dominate you, I tell YOU what music is, I say whether what you write is rubbish or not..... and actually, he was something of a crude amateur painter..... so his inflated ego & twisted mind would likely in some sense view Shostakovich as his peer@@YThome7

@@whatgivesit You didn't understand my question. Are you surprised that the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich was "approved" by Stalin and Shostakovich received a Stalin award? This is the SAME VERY Symphony that remains one of the most popular among American listeners. Re: opera Katarina Izmailova - Stalin and Molotov attended it around ten times and on the eleventh attendance Stalin and Molotov worked out and the next day opera was criticized. Isn't it strange that this opera has never been popular in the USA too? Some 15 years ago Gergiev conducted orchestral version of the opera at Kennedy Center - the hall was almost empty, only few dozens of Russians. Do Americans have the same mediocre taste as Stalin?

I completely agree with you. When listening to Shostakovich's music, background is fundamental... and cannot be ignored, even if we don't want to know the details! I want to say more about this concert and its ignored background: for me, the lack of the background in the staging of this concert is in no way an accident. The European Union (the main "producer" of this cultural or propagandistic event) has the same totalitarian goal the USSR had, instore communism, but here and now following the gentle way, the Fabian way of introducing a communist society without using violent means, and at the end without even saying the name of its result: communism. And in this concert, I don't blame the musicians, they just follow the producers instructions, for which stalinist background is no more an issue, well, for them it never has been an issue. Saying it wih more actual facts, it's not casual that criticism towards totalitarian China's methods is practically absent in the Media. As is also silenced its sneaky introduction of its societal methods in occidental democracies. I think that in these dangerous times weak thinking must be avoided, it's the price we must pay if we want to defend our democracy.

Sorry for "instore", horrible, I ment "establish"...

I consider the greatest victory of Stalin to be the fact that when Shostakovich, Maria Yudina, etc. were mentioned now, be sure to mention Him. It is unlikely that they dreamed about it and asked someone about it. But all the work is done by musicologists and authors of popular biographies ...