VICTORIA POSTNIKOVA
Russian pianist Viktoria Postnikova — legend of the immediate post-war period — celebrates the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich's death in a daring way. Combining the composer's Piano Sonata and Violin sonata — alongside her son Sasha Rozhdestvenskiy — with the Fourteenth Symphony in a rare version for piano and voice.
Programme
Interval
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)
Distribution
- Viktoria Postnikova piano
- Sasha Rozhdestvensky violin
- Ekaterina Bakanova soprano
- Alexandros Stavrakakis bass
- Fedor Khandrikov percussions
© arte
In 1926, in the glorious effusion of the Revolution and the climate of intense artistic freedom that prevailed during those years, Shostakovich composed his first Piano Sonata, aptly named ‘October’. The Sonata’s abundant, iconoclastic modernity draws its inspiration from both dodecaphonism and the music of Bartók. The general mood is one of impetuous thunder, with Shostakovich assailing his main key (C major) from all sides, then causing it to collapse in a highly symbolic gesture.
Forty-three years later, the ageing Shostakovich could not shake off his obsession with death, and composed his fourteenth and penultimate Symphony. Inspired by Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, and immediately following the thirteenth ‘Babi Yar’ Symphony commemorating the massacres of the same name, it develops an extremely original form in 11 sung movements, halfway between the symphony and the Lieder cycle, set to poems by Garcia Lorca, Apollinaire and Rilke. A work of sufficient importance for the composer, according to whom the Fourteenth Symphony would be ‘the pinnacle of my work. Everything I’ve written in recent years has been in preparation for this composition’.