Toppulous

(griffinmcelroy)

At the height of the Stalinist Terror, over half a million people were shot and significant numbers dispatched to the Gulag. Modern estimates place the Gulag population at roughly two and a half million.

During the first performance of the symphony, people were reported to have wept during the Largo movement. The music, steeped in an atmosphere of mourning, contained echoes of the panikhida, the Russian Orthodox requiem. It also recalled a genre of Russian symphonic works written in memory of the dead, including pieces by Glazunov, Steinberg, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. Typical of these works is the use of the tremolo in the strings as a reference to the hallowed ambience of the requiem.