Boléro
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Boléro is a 1928 work for large orchestra by French composer Maurice Ravel. It is one of Ravel's most famous compositions. It was also one of his last completed works before illness diminished his abi
Ida Rubinstein, who commissioned Boléro, in 1922
Ravel's Boléro, Lamoureux Orchestra, directed by Ravel himself, 1930 12" shellac disc label
Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 60, nicknamed the Leningrad Symphony, was begun in Leningrad, completed in the city of Samara in December 1941, and premiered in that city on March
Fire of anti-aircraft guns deployed in the neighborhood of St. Isaac's cathedral during the defense of Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg, its pre-Soviet name) in 1941.
Alexei Tolstoy's Pravda article became instrumental in the life of the symphony, especially with Stalin.
Virgil Thomson called the symphony "written for the slow-witted, the not very musical and the distracted".