Yet five years after writing that, on 30 December 1961, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, the Fourth Symphony finally received its first performance under the baton of Kirill Kondrashin, and I sat next to Shostakovich. As the music launched into the earth-shattering introduction, I was sure I could hear his heart beating faster. His agitation lasted right up to the magnificent coda. / Back at home, after the tremendous success of the concert, and still under the spell of what he had been listening to, Shostakovich said: ‘I think that in many respects the Fourth is superior to my later symphonies.’ Quite an admission! It may indeed have contained a hint of exaggeration, but if so, it was plainly conditioned by the impulse to defend a work that had been so unjustly neglected. For a quarter of a century, the author had himself looked askance on the symphony with the cold eye of objectivity, but now that it could actually be heard in all its overwhelming power, he immersed himself in its emotional world, identified with it and felt again his blood kinship with the paragraphs and images now brought so vividly to life.