I was certainly pleased to see two Russian works in the list - if you do a bog-standard BMus as I did, you'd think no music was written in Russia at all. But I share a certain amount of Mr H's scepticism about the choice of DSCH 7. I'm not really sure that pieces should win listings on the strength of the extra-musical circumstances which shaped their creation? Of course it might be possible to put forward a purely musical rationale for including the 7th on the list, but I fear that in fact it's been included because it's the most popular of Shostakovich's symphonies. Personally I would have chosen the 8th (which I think is the finest of them all), the 14th (for several very personal reasons... I like the poetry in it, my other half has sung it - and is due to sing it again with Elder next year - and I've performed in it myself, the celeste part). Or of course the 5th. Or the 15th.
Is 7 really Shostakovich's "most popular" symphony? One of the more popular ones, undoubtedly, but I'd have though that such a accolade would more likely be awarded to 5. Anyway, I just don't know about 14; it's a fascinating work, undoubtedly, but I still have trouble accepting it as a symphony rather than as a song-cycle (I treasure a lovely letter from a most excited Britten writing in advance of conducting its UK première). 8 is unquestionably on of the most powerful of the fifteen (thoug how he composed it in so short a space of time is utterly beyond me), 6 is still, quite unjustly, rather the Cinderella of them all, 1 is a terrific piece of writing that displays far more maturity than anyone had a right to expect from a composer of so tender an age with so few works already behind him, 10 has the dual virtues of great power and comparative approachability but, ultmately, it's no. 4 that somehow trumps them all - and I believe that the composer more or less felt the same way in his reaction to Isaac Glickman at its appallingly delayed première (by which time he was already about to embark on the weakest of the lot, no. 12) - it's the closest that he ever got to Mahler (for all that the earlier composer's symphonies display quite different proportions of tender lyricism and abrasive sardonicism than do those of the later one), but it has both a wildness and a monumentality that ser perhaps to be found nowhere else in the composer's symphonic output to quite that extent.
And I would have chosen Tchaikovsky 4 instead of 6... if we are looking for pieces which really "changed music". The moment at which the material from the first movement returns in the last movement is truly a revolutionary way of putting a symphony together. Now that did change music! I was lucky enough to hear Dmitry Jurowsky (Vladimir's younger brother) conduct it a few months ago, in a revelatory and gripping performance with the Russian Philharmonia... formerly an also-ran among the Moscow orchestra's that he's licked into fine shape since taking the helm.
I should very much like to have heard that performance. The Fourth is indeed one of its composer's finest achievements, so it would probably be something of a toss-up between it and no. 6 were I forced to have to make so impossible a choice...
