Dmitri Shostakovich, more than any other composer of the 20th century, expressed through his work, in a way that is both vivid and widely accessible, both the turbulent times in which he lived and his personal archetypal truths. The depth of his musical thought and the sincerity of his compositional language are already apparent in his original, youthful Piano Trio No. 1, and eleven years later in the Cello Sonata he develops a tremendous rhetoric that is shocking. But it doesn’t stop there; in the later String Quartet No. 10 the same composer, having now reached maturity, becomes disarmingly abstract as he treats sound and silence as equal elements, speaking in a simple and accessible way about sensations and meanings deeply engraved in the collective unconscious. Selected musicians with a long association with the Soviet composer’s work bring to light all aspects of his musical genius.