Shostakovich's 8 Comments

This is my favorite Shostokovich Symphony but it takes a real commitment of attention - it's like Mahler's 9th very tragic but rewarding. I'm playing it now - at least the opening adagio movement. This is really night music and it's 6am - not the best time for tragic music. But your poem relates a story of mystic rapture. It's an epiphany, an opening of the self to the divine invasion, as one modern mystic put it. God's presence is everywhere, there is no place of hiding. The music is reaching its climax, a tiny nudge and it will fly to Petersburg!