Symphony No. 12 (Shostakovich)

Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 12 in D minor, Op. 112, subtitled The Year of 1917, in 1961, dedicating it to the memory of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, as he did for his Symphony No. 2. The symphony was premiered that October by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky. This was also the last Shostakovich symphony which Mravinsky premiered; his refusal to give the first performance of the Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, caused a permanent strain in their working relationship.

The symphony, scored for a medium-sized orchestra, is approximately 40 minutes long and divided into four movements:

The symphony is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, and strings.

Shostakovich had attempted, or at least announced his intent, to compose a symphony depicting Lenin as far back as the latter 1930s, elaborating on the subject in more than half a dozen interviews over a two-and-a-half-year period. He had planned this symphony as a biographical drama, tracing Lenin from his youth to the new Russian society he had created and using text by such writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky. In December 1940 Shostakovich admitted that he had overreached himself and failed to write a Lenin cantata based on Mayakovsky's text. Reports of a Lenin symphony continued well into 1941, however, dissipating only with the German invasion that May.

...
Wikipedia