I should like you, please, tactfully to find out if and when it is due to be performed [Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony]. It is rather awkward for me to do it myself. I am worried that Yevgeny Mravinsky’s creative personality may not be in complete sympathy with the work, and that he may therefore treat it as cavalierly as he did the Thirteenth Symphony and the Second Cello Concerto. And so I should plan to come up five days or so before the first performance, attend the rehearsals, and afterwards go for about 7 or 8 days to Repino. I will wait for your news.