The debate over Shostakovich’s reputation raged on at this weekend’s international Shostakovich symposium in Glasgow, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the composer’s death. A memoir supposedly dictated by the composer himself and smuggled out to the west has “purportedly revealed the composer to have been a secret dissident through Stalin’s reign of terror, and to have encoded that dissidence within his music. The essence of the argument has always been this: one camp thinks it’s authentic, the other believes it to be a monstrous fraud.” – The Herald (Scotland)