James Conlon conducted the LA Phil and the Men of the Pacific Chorale in this Friday evening. Its theme is the German massacre of 33,000 Russian Jews–men, women and children–at Babi-Yar during WWII. Babi-Yar means Grandmother's Ravine. The Germans took the Jews there, and then machine-gunned them and pushed them all into the ravine.

Shostakovich wrote the symphony 21 years later, in 1962, but the Soviet government almost cancelled the first performance an hour before it was to begin, because the poem on which it was based, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, did not mention thousands of other deaths, including non-Jews, at the hands of the Germans at the same site.

The performance Carla and I attended tonight was preceded by a dramatic presentation of that attempt to cancel the first performance during a rehearsal of the orchestra.

Here's some more information about the massacre:
http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/aa080799.htm