Originally Posted by Dan Gilbert

Well, you are wrong about Testimony, and I hope you are joking. Testimony has been proven a sham. The signatures in Testimony are not forgeries - they are copied from the first pages of articles he published in Pravda. The rest of each article is a fraud. Even Maxim Shostakovich confirmed this.

If you show me what's so formalistic about the 4th symphony, I'll be more inclined to agree, but my conclusion from what I've read is that he simply hated the conductor and didn't really like the symphony. He publicly performed a piano reduction of the 4th symphony soon after he withdrew it. If he was worried it would get him into all kinds of trouble, why would he have done that?

However, I'm not disputing the fact that he hated Stalin. I think that a lot of his music, especially the tenth symphony reflects that.

The historian Ian McDonald agrees with your viewpoint - however, I would recommend you read "Shostakovich: The Symphonies by Blokker and Dearling for an opposing viewpoint. If you haven't read Ian McDonald's The New Shostakovich, I recommend that you do, as it proves very well that Testimony is a fraud.