Symphony No. 14: op. 135. soprano, bass and chamber orchestra. Study score.

Shostakovich composed his Symphony No.14 for soprano, bass, string orchestra and percussion during a hospital stay in the spring of 1969. Modest Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had already orchestrated a few years earlier, can clearly be recognised as a source of inspiration. This penultimate symphony is structured as a cycle of eleven settings of texts by different poets (Lorca, Apollinaire, Kuchelbecker and Rilke), all of which deal with death. In a speech at th...