American premieres of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7

The American broadcast premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini on July 19, 1942. This was followed by the American concert premiere played at Tanglewood by the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra, a student ensemble, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky on August 16.

Shostakovich's music had been well known in the United States since the local premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in 1928. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was celebrated and criticized upon its American premiere in 1935; the fallout from its censure by Soviet authorities in 1936 was reported on across the country. The fortunes of his Symphony No. 5 and resulting political rehabilitation were also extensively covered in the press.

The Symphony No. 7 was completed on December 27, 1941, followed by the first American news reports about it in January 1942. Its origins in the siege of Leningrad, during which Shostakovich briefly worked in a local firefighting brigade, generated levels of public interest and press coverage considered unusually high for a modern musical composition. Leopold Stokowski and Toscanini, co-music directors of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, competed for the first broadcast rights to the symphony, which were ultimately won by the latter. Koussevitzky was granted the right to conduct the first performance in concert.

Prolonged standing ovations met the premieres of the symphony, which went on to become exceptionally popular with American audiences during World War II, and was briefly considered as the basis for a Hollywood film. Critics, including Olin Downes and Nicholas Nabokov, were divided. Béla Bartók, who had listened to its premiere, disliked it to the point that he satirized it in his Concerto for Orchestra. The symphony also had its defenders, including Koussevitzky and Carl Sandburg, who celebrated the symphony in a nationally syndicated open letter.