Symphony No. 13 in B‑Flat Minor

Shostakovich’s 12th Symphony (1961), a commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, ticked all the right official boxes. The 13th, composed the following year, was a very different matter. Shostakovich took five politically sensitive poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and set them for the unusual combination of bass soloist, male chorus (all basses), and large orchestra. The focus on bass voices, so central to Russian religious rites, enhances the “national” character of the music, but the content is highly critical. Russian anti-Semitism is touched on in the bleak first movement, subversive humour is celebrated wildly in the second, and the other three movements invoke the patience of Russian women, queueing endlessly at shops and prisons, and the fears supposedly banished by Soviet Communism with a final sly tribute to those who put integrity before career. Following the words enhances the experience, yet the music has a raw power and an edgy beauty that help it largely speak for itself. After its first performance, the 13th Symphony was discreetly silenced in Russia. Today, however, its searing expression of defiance finds echoes all over the world.