Shostakovich – Symphonies 2 “Dedicated to October” and 12 “The Year 1917”

Emil Tabakov continues his Gega New series of Shostakovich Symphonies with the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra with numbers Two and Twelve.  Both of these symphonies celebrate the October 1917 revolution: the Second composed for the tenth anniversary in 1927 uses a propaganda text by the poet Alexander Bezymensky, which Shostakovich thought “very weak.”  Number Twelve, composed in 1960, continues from the previous symphony and recalls events that Shostakovich witnessed.