Shostacovich

His chamber music's great & greatly underrated. The symphonies -- well, to enjoy them you have to be in the mood for big Russian symphonies, and they're pretty modern. In the wrong mood they give me the jitters. In the right mood they're like Mahler if Mahler had been susceptible to the occasional case of the jitters. That said, like a lot of Russian composers, he's got a slow-grand-thematic-buildup thing going that's really effective.

I've barely delved into them, but his string quartets are great and apparently have been undergoing some kind of reappraisal in recent years. There's a nice cheap set on Melodia [Melodiya sometimes] that includes them all.

Same goes for his 24 Preludes and Fugues, the reappraisal I mean. I can't tell you yet what I really think of them, but they're at the very least something you're Supposed To Hear, especially since they're made out to be the modernist/late Romantic answer to Beethoven's Diabelli Variations which was the classical period answer to Bach's Goldbach Variations.

oooh, yeah, I love his string quartets. I played viola in a quartet in high school and his stuff is really fun to play and always sounds really amazing when you hear it coming out of your own instrumen

there's a couple of nice free mp3 downloads on epitonic, which give a fair idea of his style.

Bach's Goldbach Variations
Sorry Josh but here you are confusing something. There is the Goldbach conjecture in number theory: "every number that is a sum of two primes can be written as a sum of as many primes as one wants". This Goldbach has no connection whatever to Johann Sebastian Bach.
The variations are called Goldberg variations after one of the foremost piano players at the time of Bach. Some interesting background info on the name here.

...or Josh could just have been typing quickly and made an unintended typo ;-)

Back to Shos-TAR-kovich (sic): personally I'm a big fan of the Symphonies, particularly the ones that don't fit the mould suggested by John above, e.g. 9, 14 and 15. Number 14 is actually a chamber piece with loads of songs, but it's also the most "difficult", sonically.

Also search: 1, 4, 5, 10, and 11 - the latter being my favourite symphony by anyone.

Whoops, yep, Jeff's right, I just wasn't paying attention. I'm well aware of the difference!

Dmitri S = absolute 99.99% fuxing classic! IMO far and away thee best composer of the 20th C. Poss the best all-round artist too. My favourite of his - "Babi Yar" (symph nr13) This is 5 movements, based around poems bya russian fellow whose name escapes me at present, the theme being anti-semitism (this when USSR was going thru bad anti-semitic phase, so V brave also) but also taking in free thought vs goin along w/the status quo. The first four movements are very dark & foreboding, grim & frightening (NB it is scored for orchestra, male choir & solo bass male vocal. Very strange line-up). The last one, "A Career" is like the sun rising after a stormy night. When the flute fanfare opens this movement, it is undoubtedly the most profound & beautiful piece of art I have ever experienced. I would get "Babi Yar" first, as it contains some of his "Difficult" music, but also moments of extreme beauty. If you like it, you'll probably like a lot of his other pieces. If you are lookig for an easier way in, symph nr10 is good. I would avoid "Katerina Ismailova"/"Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk Region". That one really is a bit bloody much. I like the recordings of shostakovitch put out on the Chandos label. In fact I fuxing love Chandos records. They're great. This will sound like trolling, but it's not. I think Shostakovitch is the composer people make Mahler out to be.

i always liked the first cello concerto also (the second on the LP version i have has this big percussive WHOMP at one point that fuXoRs the mike which is poor as regards classical hi-fi but quite funny as regards unintended comedy moments in the classics) (on the other hand my dad once bought a DGG haydn symphony where you could hear two women in the audience whispering near the mike!)

didn't ian macdonald write a book about him: i bet it was rubbish

I bet it was! My friend andy had a mahler CD where U could hear the conductor periodically clearing his throat. Bet noise like that I have - Dvorak "hymnus" there's a pause before the choir comes in, and you can hear them all drawing breath! It's spooky....