Playing the fourth movement (Allegro Non Troppo) of Shostakovich’s 5th in high school concert band, I had no idea of the circumstances under which it had been composed – an artist threatened with suppression or persecution.
It may have been in the later 1970s that I became aware of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I don’t recall exactly what brought him to my attention. It may have been news reports of the Soviet Union’s exiled dissident. Solzhenitsyn had been deported from the USSR and stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1974. He later came…
Kingdom Venturers 