Director
Tony Palmer

Music extracts from
Violin Concerto No 1; Michelangelo Sonnets; Symphonies Nos 5, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15; Piano Concerto No 2; String Quartet No 10

Performers
Ben Kingsley : Dmitri Shostakovich
Robert Stephens : Meyerhold
Murray Melvin : Film editor
Peter Woodthorpe : Glazunov
Brook Williams : HG Wells
Robert Urquhart : Journalist
Mark Thrippleton : Young Stalin
Tracy Spence : Tsvetayeva
John Shrapnel : Zhadanov
David Sharpe : Mandelstam


Dmitri Shostakovich died in 1975, the most decorated Soviet civilian of his time, an internationally feted composer, and a true hero of the Russian people, a lifelong Communist.

Or so everyone except his closest friends and colleagues thought. Shortly after his death, a book purporting to be his autobiography - Testimony, his memoirs apparently dictated to a young journalist called Solomon Volkov who then defected to the West - appeared. The book was mordantly witty, uncompromising in its demolition of certain people, and painted a picture of the composer as a broken man who had endured unimaginable terror at the hands of the regime: a fervent non-Communist whose music, far from being a celebration of the Soviet world, was a bitter condemnation of it.

Quarter of a century on, Testimony is now widely accepted by most who know about the composer as at worst an authentic picture of the composer, and probably largely accurate. However, there are still plenty who violently dispute the authenticity of the book, and the vitriolic wrangling continues on the Internet unabated (see links left).

Directed by Tony Palmer in 1987 and starring Ben Kingsley in the title role, Testimony the film tells the story of Shostakovich and his complex relationship with Stalin and the Soviet regime. Though his music incurred Stalin's wrath on many occasions, he survived the Terror. Many of his friends did not.

Shostakovich became wildly successful as a student with his Symphony No 1 and worked with all the famous Russian artists of his day: Meyerhold, Mayakovsky and Eisenstein. But Stalin hated his opera Lady Macbeth, denouncing it in Pravda. Humiliated, Shostakovich was forced to write approved pro-regime works, which his Symphony No 5 was - at least on the surface. It rehabilitated the composer's reputation and probably saved his life. His Symphony No 7, the Leningrad, was written during the Siege and became a worldwide symbol of resistance and heroism. Yet once again, after the War, Stalin tormented him, forcing him to betray his friends. Shostakovich never forgave himself. Stalin died in 1953; Shostakovich survived, now pouring out his agony and his frustration in a series of heart-rending late works.

Tony Palmer's film catches with brutal accuracy the atmosphere of Shostakovich's world, a dark and terrifying place only made bearable by his music of extraordinary power, passion and emotion, which is featured throughout the film.

And, if you're wondering where the extraordinarily accurate location shooting was done, which so perfectly captures the grim brutality of Soviet housing-block architecture, the grey brooding menace of its dull townscapes, and the agoraphobic mudflats stretching out from St Petersburg to Finland... it was Liverpool and Wigan.