Much More Than Just "That" Theme

A great big iconic work today, Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, the Leningrad, played by the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. It is a work that comes with a huge amount of baggage of course. Written at least in part in the besieged city of Leningrad during WW2, the symphony caused a sensation both within Russia and also in the US and Britain as a symbol of heroic resistance to the Nazi juggernaut. The ambiguities surfaced later. Was the work just as much or maybe even more of a comment on Stalin's tyranny as it was on the German invasion ? Was the long, repetitive and relentless march theme in the first movement a powerful evocation of the threat of and resistance too the invaders or was it musically banal in the extreme ? It is a feature of the symphony that can be picked on while the rest of the work is overlooked. Personally, I find it powerful but then I like Bolero and Prokofiev's battle on the ice to which it bears many similarities. I feel that whatever Shostakovich's views of the Stalinist regime, there is still a germ in the symphony that speaks of the struggle of the Russian people and those besieged in Leningrad in particular. I'm glad I have it played by Russian forces and the disk includes a brief spoken broadcast that the composer made from the city in 1941.