Writer, composer, broadcaster and arranger Stephen Johnson presented Radio 3’s Discovering Music for 14 years. He is also a regular contributor to the BBC Music Magazine. He is the author of Bruckner Remembered (Faber 1998), and studies of Mahler and Wagner (Naxos 2006, 2007). His book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (Notting Hill Editions, 2018) won a Rubery Book Award in 2021. It was followed in 2020 by a book about Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 (Faber).
With fifty years passing since his death in 1975, what does Shostakovich’s music mean for us today? Stephen Johnson outlines six lessons from this multifaceted composer – who might just be playing with us...
