SOURCE: A review of an audio recording of Babi Yar Symphony, in American Record Guide, September 19, 1996, pp. 202-3.

In the following review, Linkowski praises an audio recording of Shostakovich's Babi Yar Symphony, detailing its origins in Yevtushenko's poem and its premier performance in 1962.

Russian Anti-Semitism is not a well-guarded secret. The Czars had their pogroms and the commissars their purges. Even those who were accomplished in the Arts and Sciences were not free from the ever-present shadow of discrimination. When the doors of the prison finally opened, thousands of Jews fled to new lives in the West. This unthinking racism was not solely the province of the illiterate mujik, but also of the intelligencia. Dostoyevsky was a noted hater of Jews. But so then were such composers of beautiful, soulful, romantic music as Balakirev, Moussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky. Even Stravinsky engaged in the fashionable Western European anti-Semitism of his...