Shostakovich’s Thirteenth for bass solo, male choir and orchestra, consists of five movements to five different poems by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The first movement (‘Babi Yar’) takes its theme from one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust. Babi Yar is a ravine near Kiev where a Nazi detachment murdered over 30 thousand Ukrainian Jews. Not even a memorial was erected at Babi Yar until 1976, which led the poet in 1961 and the composer in 1962 to erect their own monuments in music. The second movement (‘Humour’) is shrill music with a circus atmosphere. The poem speaks of the immortality of humour and when the soloist and chorus are singing about how humour survived its own execution and danced a little dance, a ‘mistuned’ version of the theme from the third movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion enters. The slow third movement (‘In the Store’) is a tribute to Soviet women who survived the hardships of the Second World War. The ending of this movement is the only place in the work where the male chorus, up till then singing in unison, splits into three parts for a plagal cadence to pay homage to the heroines of grim everyday life. The fourth movement (‘Fears’) is about fears old and new in Russia and the 1960s Soviet Union. ‘Fears are dying out in Russia’, the soloist sings, while the orchestra gives a chilling rendering of the atmosphere of fear… And when the poem comes to the part about old times, Shostakovich evokes a well-known Soviet massovaya pesnya or mass song. The finale (‘Career’) is again ironic, where the punch line of the spoofing of petit careerists is,‘I follow my career by not following it!’