Keeping Score: Shostakovich

Classical music historian Michael Tilson Thomas hosts this unusual glimpse into the life and work of seminal Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which rests on an unusual historical footnote. The program delineates how, although Shostakovich feared for his life at the hands of the Soviet Army (because of an opera publicly condemned in a local paper), he successfully attempted to "redeem" himself writing a hymn to the motherland, the 1937 Symphony No. 5. It then makes a radical suggestion:...