I have loved Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony since I first discovered it courtesy of Coventry Record Library in about 1960 as a schoolboy. Interestingly, some of my more “cool” (i.e. Rock and Roll loving) friends also got hooked on it because of its louder, percussive sections.

Few, if any, of you will have lived in fear of the midnight knock on the door by secret police, the fear that you will be taken away to some terrible interrogation centre and subjected to unspeakable tortures. We can only guess at the effect it must have on the human spirit. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), an intensely shy and private man, the leading composer of the Soviet Union, lived with this fear for much of his life.

Shostakovich found early success with his music and, as a good communist, tried hard to reconcile his creative spirit with the need to satisfy the Party’s demands for music that supported the revolutionary ideology. He wrote music for films, his Second and Third Symphonies celebrated the proletariat, he was held up as a model of the Soviet artist. Then in 1936 Josef Stalin, hardly an intellectual, went to a performance of Shostakovich’s opera “Lady MacBeth Of The Mtsensk District,” which until then had played to enthusiastic audiences, and denounced it as “formalist cacophony.” Overnight, the composer became labelled An Enemy Of The People. That was the time when huge numbers of Soviet citizens were being shipped off to prison camps and put to enforced labour, many to die miserable deaths. So convinced was Shostakovich of his imminent arrest that he camped for a time by the lift in his apartment block so that his family would not have to witness it. He even contemplated suicide...

Yet throughout his life, Shostakovich continued to believe in the Communist ideology – or so it was generally assumed. Since his death in 1975 there have been many stories about the hidden messages buried within his music, notably in Volkov’s book “Testimony,” which purports to tell of the private Shostakovich and his true feelings about the Soviet regime. Volkov claimed to have inside knowledge, though this has been widely disputed, not least by the composer’s son Maxim. Nevertheless, it is possible to find in his music much to make one wonder. It is said, for instance, that the demonic second movement of the Tenth Symphony, with its rattling side-drum and whirlwind force, is a musical portrait of Stalin. His Thirteenth Symphony takes a more audacious step: a huge choral work, it sets to music four poems of Yevtushenko, himself a focus for official disapproval, poems which tell of the dark side of Soviet life. The first of these is a condemnation of the anti-semitism which existed in the USSR at the time (and to a lesser extent still does). Kruschev (remember him?) demanded the symphony be banned after its first performance and it was not until officially approved revisions of the poems had been made that further performances were permitted. I still treasure a vinyl recording of that first performance.

Critics have divided Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies into two main groups. There are the Masterpieces; and there are the Others. The Masterpieces are the first, fifth, eighth, tenth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth. In other words, he had more misses than hits. So say (or said until recently) the critics. However, one should consider the words of another great twentieth century composer, Sibelius:

Well said, Sibelius! For while it cannot be denied that some of these symphonies are stronger than others, they all tell of their composer’s inner feelings and chart the history of Soviet Russia.

The Eleventh Symphony is one work in which many “coded” messages are to be found. The subtitle “The Year 1905” refers to the abortive Russian uprising when a huge number of people, gathered outside the Tsar’s palace in silent protest against the living conditions they were enduring, were massacred by the Tsar’s troops. However, it is now agreed that the work has a wider agenda: it was written immediately after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, cruelly crushed by Soviet military might and is seen as a Symphonic protest at all misuse of power against the Common Man.

Double basses almost inaudibly play a scurrying tune over which the woodwind play a slower version of the same tune, a quote from one of Shostakovich’s earlier works to which he set the words “O Tsar our little father, look around you, life is impossible because of the Tsar’s servants against whom we are helpless” (all right, it probably sounds better in Russian). The scurrying pattern depicts the crowds hurrying to the Palace Square for a peaceful protest. For the first time in the symphony the weight of the full orchestra is felt as this tune is tossed to and fro, an awesome noise. Eventually the clamour subsides, the main tune sounding quietly while the distant drumbeats tell us something is not right. Plucked strings bring the music to a faltering halt.

The sound is clear and has tremendous presence and power, though you may want to turn up the volume in the quieter passages. The crucial bells, heard only in that final clamour, are well caught. Other fine performances are marred by the inability of the recording engineers to capture them over the rest of the noise the orchestra is making.

You may be lucky enough to find, as I did recently, the complete set of Shostakovich symphonies (11 discs) at Superdrug (yes really!) for the silly price of – wait for it - £3.99! This is conducted throughout by Rudolf Barshai who is a viola player and who was – yes, you guessed it – a friend of the composer. This too is well played and recorded though the Eleventh is just a shade lower in voltage than the white heat of Rostropovich. Still, at that price…