SOURCE: A review of the Babi Yar Symphony, in American Record Guide, January 11, 1996, pp. 174-5.

In the following review, Hansen highlights the musical significance of literary allusions to Babi Yar in an audio recording of Shostakovich's symphonic version of the poem.

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...