POSTNIKOVA / SEMENCHUK / HUSEYNOV

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. 

The climate is not the same in the Second Sonata, composed in 1943: the USSR is at war, and although Shostakovich has been a national hero since the Leningrad Symphony two years earlier, the period is still one of doubts and anguish. This impression is particularly palpable in the first movement, with its irregular, shifting metrics, and in the second, a deep, painful lament. As for the Finale, its construction is so elaborate and accomplished that it alone is longer than the entire first Sonata! 

Twenty-six 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’.