Description
Book SynopsisThrough interviews conducted with surviving members of Soviet orchestras, through his reading of philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neurologists, Johnson paints a compelling picture of one man's music and its power to validate and sustain another man's life.
Trade Review'How Shostakovich Changed My Mind' is one of the most powerful, honest, and profound revelations that exists on what it is that music means and does: it's just an essential document.' - Tom Service, Presenter, Music Matters; '... an intensely readable, highly personal analysis of the major works of a composer, who, Mr. Johnson decides, has recorded a collective experience for an all-inclusive listenership....All great music teeters the edge of madness. This troubled writer makes a convincing case that the music of Dmitri Shostakovich helped to save his mind. In life's crises, he suggests, each of us comes up against an internal siege of Leningrad, and music comes to your relief.' Norman Lebrecht, The Wall Street Journal; 'For Radio 3 presenter and journalist, Stephen Johnson, Shostakovich's music is nothing less than a matter of life and death. Johnson, a tireless and passionate advocate of the man and his works, explores how the fraught music of Shostakovich shepherded the Soviet Union through the dark times of Stalin and the Great Patriotic War - and also helped to pull Johnson, suffering from clinical depression, out of the suicidal depths of despair.' Classical Music Magazine;
