What Song Are You Listening To, Right Now?

This is what comes of thinking about how you haven't made a Brandy Alexander all winter right as you fall asleep, and now it's almost too late, then you wake up with this song stuck in your head. lol

 
ThatOwlWoman said:
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You have good taste. One of the iconic great "five".
My Papa was a concert violinist, and I distinctly remember him saying that without the great "Five" Russian nationalist composers, there never would have ultimately been a Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, or Stravinsky.
 
Dimitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 in C Major
A covert musical statement on totalitarianism

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
Shostakovich immediately volunteered for the army, but with his eyesight—to say nothing of his importance as a cultural icon—he was instantly rejected. He spent the next month digging ditches and anti-tank barriers around Leningrad and was then assigned to the Conservatory fire-fighting brigade.Shostakovich completed the magnificent and inspiring first movement of the Seventh on September 3, 1941, just as the Germans were completing their blockade of Leningrad. Shostakovich and his Seventh Symphony were propaganda windfalls for the embattled Soviet government. Here was the heroic young composer, resisting evacuation from his native city; at the same time, he was composing a symphony that expressed the plight, the power, the dignity, and the optimism of the Russian people.

The real meaning of the Seventh Symphony is rather more interesting than the legend.

As Shostakovich’s friend Flora Litvinova recalled, Shostakovich said that the symphony was “not about fascism but about our system, in general about totalitarianism”. Shostakovich said much the same thing thirty years later, noting that he had planned the symphony before the war and calling Stalin as much a criminal as Hitler for the millions he tortured and killed and for his destruction of Leningrad before the war.
 
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