Can there be a body of music more suited than Shostakovich's to sum up the 20th Century? This music is angry, violent, bitter, biting, depressive, ugly, coarse, brutal, sardonic, haunted, enigmatic, gloomy, desperate, terrified, sentimental, brooding, ironic, and always fiercely emotional under the bleak surface. So how can it be that I am willing to suggest that he is our century's greatest symphonist, when I have often in these pages ground the ax that the primary purpose of music is to create beauty and take us to a level of consciousness beyond the ordinary world? Can it be that beauty is a rather difficult commodity to create from thin air in a century whose main contribution to history is the perfection of the technology to commit atrocities on a scale only dreamt of in night mares by previous ages? In the controversial set of memoirs compiled by Solomon Volkov that may or may not be from Shostakovich's mouth, Shostakovich is supposed to have stated on one occasion that each of his works is a tombstone, a monument to some unhappy soul forcibly torn from this life too soon and often in the most unspeakable manner. If we keep that in mind, we can look at Shostakovich's symphonies as a series of lamentations for what has been lost, an extended threnody for a world shorn of beauty, love, compassion, kindness, and fundamental humanity. After Hitler and Stalin, the Bomb and MAD, Bosnia and O.J., a belief in the perfectibility of mankind is pretty untenable if not outright absurd. The human race is not inexorably evolving to a greater state of perfection. It has just as easily devolved into forms of barbarism that no other species of the animal kingdom has ever remotely approximated. Could that be Heaven around the next corner … or some new Hell?

I've been immersing myself in Babi Yar for some weeks now, and I suppose it shows. One doesn't walk away from this symphony or its successor in an upbeat frame of mind. I wouldn't recommend listening to it after a bad day at work. In the process, I've made a survey of just about all of the readily available CD recordings—Masur (Teldee), Kamu (Chandos), Rostropovich (Erato), Haitink (Philips)—and I can say that the work is very well represented on discs. Despite the stiff competition, the Solti recording is a welcome addition, Perhaps taking its cue from Masur—whose concert recording includes an over-the-top reading by Yevtushenko himself of the opening poem. "Babi Yar," followed by a newly written, post-Soviet poem called "The Loss"—London has had the good sense to engage actor Anthony Hopkins to recite the poems, much in the same way RCA added a reciter to Previn's old recording of the Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony. It works very well, but I wonder why the poems for the last three movements are read as a clump after II (fear of upsetting the musical flow?). But you can program it otherwise.

Even more than in the average vocal symphony, the text of "Babi Yar" is the key to the whole work. The opening poem, about the Nazi slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews outside of Kiev in 1941, is really the jumping-off point for an extended criticism of the Soviet system. The composer uses the Babi Yar tragedy as an introductory analogy for the Stalinist reign of terror over all Russians, Jewish or otherwise. This was rather daring stuff even in the early 1960s, and the poems, let alone the symphony, could not have been performed in public 10 or even 5 years before. IV, called "Fears", given Shostakovich's characteristic Largo marking, is the heart of the work, reaching a devastating climax at 9:20 in a performance that carries terrifying weight and oppressive force in Solti's hands. The poem is called "Fears":

Fears are dying out in Russia … I remember when they were powerful and mighty at the court of the lie triumphant … All this seems remote today. It is even strange to remember now. The secret fear of an anonymous denunciation, the secret fear of a knock at the door. Yes, and the fear of speaking to foreigners? Foreigners?… even to your own wife! I see new fears dawning: the fear of being untrue to one's country, the fear of dishonestly debasing ideas which are self-evident truths: the fear of boasting oneself into a stupor … And while I am writing these lines, at times unintentionally hurrying, I write haunted by the single fear of not writing with all my strength.

It is as if the composer and poet say with a sad ironic half-smile, "This is the way it used to be, but of course now it doesn't happen anymore". The audience at the premiere must have ruefully savored the bitter irony. Yevtusnenko's texts are not all dark and oppressive—there is sardonic humor, defiance, even outright silliness in places—and Shostakovich's music reflects and magnifies the impact of the words. The work is a universal masterpiece, because it speaks not only to those who suffered in Stalinist Russia but to anybody who recognizes the pervasive evil of oppression and tyranny and its many forms, even in a "free" society like our own.

Solti, the Chicago Symphony, and the superb chorus are an ideal combination for this work. The brutal, vicious parts have a magnificent wild energy, and the sullen rebellion lurking under the surface of the slow movements never conceals the powerful emotion fueling it all. Yet they are still able to convey the lighter, almost frivolous quality of portions of the finale. Close comparisons with the recent Masur are unavoidable, but Solti and the CSO edge out the Teldec issue in just about every major category. The CSO's brass have the truly sepulchral, guttural, Russian sound so vital to this symphony. For comparison, listen to the tavern episode in I. Solti gives us focused, biting, malevolent energy and whip-crack precision where Masur is rather soggy and weak. Or the climax of the movement at "Nyet! Eta ledokhod!" with its stentorian, ponderous brass bellowings rising over shrieking, terrified strings and woodwinds and a fusillade of thunderous percussion. Solti makes the episode shattering, where Masur merely indicates for the listener that there is some sort of important dramatic event in progress. Masur's soloist. Sergei Leiferkus, is no mean vocalist, but his voice is too lightweight for the music. Aleksashkin, on the other hand, has the rich, sonorous, dark chocolate roar reminiscent of a Christoff or Ghiaurov in their prime.

One continues to be impressed and gratified by what borders on an artistic rebirth in the Indian Summer of Solti's career. For most of the 1980s he seemed to settle into the late-career revisiting of a handful of favorite works typical of many great conductors. But he is too restless, too exploratory a conductor to settle for that. He needs new music and new challenges for his remarkable energy, and Shostakovich has supplied that kind of stimulus. In the album notes, Sir George commented on his belated discovery of this work and Shostakovich's music as a whole: "I didn't know much about his life … I didn't trust what I heard, and everything that was Stalinism was suspect: so I didn't want to touch it. Until I heard the Fifth Symphony and that made a strong impression on me. I thought 'That must be genuine, because there is so much oppression in the piece, such a real, hopeless, Moussorgskian oppression. That cannot be a political fake, it is real'. I felt I had to do this symphony now. I will do all that I can to show what a musical masterpiece it is, and what a glorious partnership there is between Shostakovich and Yevtushenko … I feel it's my duty to do it. And of course duty is not enough … It should be as good as possible. That's the duty." Sir George, don't worry: you've fulfilled your duty and then some.