Quote Originally Posted by Mibbes Aye View Post
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Good thread. And I agree beauty takes many forms when there is such a broad and diverse range of classical music.

For vocal or choral pieces, I will chip in with Allegri’s “Miserere” and Geoffrey Burgon’s “Nunc Dimittis”.

I like Shostakovich a huge amount and there is a different kind of beauty to be found in his symphonic works. The first movement of his Tenth Symphony, especially as it builds roundabout halfway though is perhaps my favourite, but it’s also difficult to match the third movement of his Fifth. The piece as a whole has been interpreted in conflicting ways over the decades and I choose to interpret ithe third movement as a portrayal of the horror of Stalin’s persecution of the population.

Final recommendation is something from the same time and also very ethereal, but completely different altogether - Vaughan Williams’ “Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus”. It’s simply sublime.
It's topical to point out Shostakovich was a big football fan and wrote reports for the Soviet sports papers. He was quoted in an article in Time magazine in 1942 :-
“The climax of joy is not when you’re through a new symphony, but when you are hoarse from shouting, with your hands stinging from clapping, your lips parched, and you sip your second glass of beer after you’ve fought for it with 90,000 other spectators to celebrate the victory of your favorite team.”

His favourite was was then called Zenit Leningrad.

I've become cautious of reading too much into the supposed political agenda of Shostakoch's music. The official interpretation of his tenth symphony is that is a epitaph following Stalin's death. It's not.
For one thing, it was composed in 1951 when Stalin was very much alive (compare it with his 5th string quartet) and for another the music includes his musical initials - d, e flat, c and b - which always (that's ALWAYS!) indicates he's writing about personal matters.