Shostakovich Quotes

Brancusi has his medium: Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich, theirs. Mine happens to be cloth.

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

I love Gustavo Dudamel and I love what he does for classical music, and I love what he comes out of, El Sistema and the old man Abreu. When we were in Venezuela, I had the chance to go to his building. He had, like, five or six orchestras playing of kids from the hood playing, like, Mahler's third symphony and Shostakovich fifth and Beethoven. Man, it's unbelievable. I mean, they could play.

I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

The friendship of Shostakovich cast a brilliant light over my whole life and whose spiritual qualities captured my soul once and for all time.

Now I want to use money in a good way. I make foundations back home in Russia, I have sponsored vaccinations for more than one million children in my homeland and I have founded scholarships in the names of my great Russian compatriots - Oistrakh, Richter, Gilels, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Schnittke.

Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.