Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13 “Babi Yar”

As part of our Kurt Masur retrospective, here is a recording that sadly resonates with the ongoing tragic events in Ukraine. Shostakovich’s thirteenth symphony “Babi Yar” was composed in memory of the victims of the horrific massacres in Kiyv during the Second World War, and refers to the memorial site that has been recently struck by a Russian missile. This work, vigorously condemning antisemitism, was composed after texts by dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who appears on this live recording as narrator of his own poem Babi Yar (a protest against USSR’s refusal to identify this place as the site of mass murders).