Shostakovich CD makes the top 10!

Very excited that our new Shostakovich CD has made it into the top 10 of the Classical charts this week and was reviewed by the Sunday Times!


'polished and passionate'  The Sunday Times

Timeline

1906 – Birth of Shostakovich on September 25^th, St.Petersburg
1914-1918 – World War 1
1924 – Death of Lenin
1926 – Symphony No.1 premiered to great acclaim
1929 – Stalin becomes leader of the USSR
1932 – Shostakovich marries Nina Varzar

Shostakovich with Nina and Ivan Sollertinsky
 

1936 – Birth of daughter, Galina
1936 – Pravda attacks Opera, Lady Macbeth as 'chaos instead of music'
1937 – Stalin's year of terror
1938 – String Quartet No.1 (aged 31)
1938 – Birth of son, Maxim
1939-1945 – World War 2
1940 - Receives Stalin Prize for Piano Quintet

With the Glazunov Quartet in 1940

1944 – String Quartet No.2 (aged 38)
1946 – Churchill declares 'an Iron curtain has descended across the continent'
1946 – String Quartet No.3 (aged 40)
1948 - Zhdanov Decree - Dismissed from his posts at Moscow and Leningrad.
1949 - The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb
1949 – String Quartet No.4 (aged 43)

In 1949

1952 – String Quartet No.5 (aged 46)
1953 – Death of Stalin
1954 – Death of Nina Varzar
1956 – Shostakovich meets and marries his second wife Margarita Kainova
1956 – String Quartet No.6 (aged 49)
1956 – Hungarian uprising
1959 – Divorces Margarita Kainova
1960 – String Quartet No.7 (aged 53)

1960 – Shostakovich joins the Communist party
1960 – String Quartet No.8 (aged 53)
1961 – Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space

With Kabalevsky and Gagarin
 

1962 – Cuban missile crisis
1962 – Marries his third wife, Irina Antonia Supinskiya
1964 – Leonid Brezhnev becomes leader of the USSR
1964 – String Quartet No.9 (aged 57)
1964 – String Quartet No.10
1965 – Death of Vasili Shirinsky, second violinst of the Beethoven Quartet
1966 – String Quartet No.11 (aged 59)

with Britten in 1966

1966 – Shostakovich suffers his first heart attack
1968 – String Quartet No.12 (aged 61)
1968 – Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
1970 – String Quartet No.13 (aged 63)
1971 – Shostakovich suffers his second heart attack
1972 – Death of Vadim Borisovsky, original violist of the Beethoven Quartet
1972 – Undergoes radiation treatment for lung cancer
1973 – String Quartet No.14 (aged 66)
1973 – Shostakovich's name appears on a document in Pravda denouncing Sakharov

1974 – String Quartet No.15 (aged 67)
1974 – Death of Sergei Shirinsky following a rehearsal of Quartet No.15
1974 – Taneyev Quartet give the premiere of Quartet No.15
1975 – Death of Shostakovich on August 9^th, Moscow