A bare four days before the opening of Prague's International Music Festival, music-loving Czechs got an impressive answer to a question they had been asking for a year: Whom will the Russians send? The answer came in a red-starred C-47 direct from Moscow: Russia had sent thin, 40-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the world's five greatest living composers.*
In spite of his efforts to stay out of the limelight, shy Dmitri Shostakovich stole the show. One of the festival's big events was his Eighth Symphony, conducted by friend Eugene Mravinsky (to whom the Eighth is dedicated), conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. When...
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