Great Symphony, Great Conductor

Still not a lot of time for blogging, but I'm sure things will improve in the near future. In the meantime, I am still reading Sviatoslav Richter's notebooks in which he comments on just about every concert he attended. On Jan. 27, 1972 he heard the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in Moscow conducted by Evgeny Mravinsky. He conducted the orchestra from 1938 until his death in 1988. Since then they have been conducted by Yuri Temirkanov, but now they are known as the St. Petersburg Philharmonic (I saw them in concert last May).

The first work on the program was the Symphony No. 6 by Shostakovich:

I don't know how Shostakovich manages to grip the listener so strongly from the first note. One of those many mysteries of music...