Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor I Op. 113 „Babi Yar“ by St. Petersburg Camerata / Lith. Chamber Orch. / Est. National Male-Voice Choir / Sondeckis: (CD)

In 1961 the then twenty-nine-year-old Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem entitled Babi Yar in the Literaturnaya gazeta. Babi Yar was the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev which in 1941 had been the scene of a mass execution where, within the space of thirty-six hours, some 34.000 Jewish men, women and children were shot by a special unit of the German SS. In his poem Yevtushenko used the National Socialists‘ act of genocide as the starting-point of an attack on anti-Semitism in general, which he pilloried as a timeless evil that was widespread throughout the world, but which, he implied, was especially rife in Russia. Few Russian composers of the past were above reproach as far as anti-Semitism was concerned. Of these, the two that spring most immediately to mind are Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich. Shostakovich had already revealed his philo-Semitic sympathies in his song-cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, written during the final years of Stalinism (when anti- Semitism was even officially condoned) but forced to wait until 1955 for its first performance, which finally took place only against a background of considerable resistance. It was enough for the composer to read Yevtushenko‘s Babi Yar for him to decide to set it to music. Initially he thought in terms of a single movement, but after completing it in this form he resolved to add four further movements, all of them settings of other poems by Yevtushenko: Humour, In the Store, Fears (written specifically for the occasion) and Career. The score was completed on 20 July 1962, but it took a long tune to establish itself in the concert hall. The first performance took place in in Moscow in December 1962. Due to political pressure Yevtushenko had to revise Babi Yar and Fears, which Shostakovich accepted only reluctantly. This recording however restores the original version of Yevtushenko’s words. The present release comes from the 24 bit /96 khz stateof- the-art recordings out of the St. Petersburg Classics archive. They are carefully remastered by the prestigious Grammy award-winning b-sharp studio Berlin using the original source material

released December 1, 2019

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