Three successive generations of Russian music – with Shostakovich at the centre, seeming both to take and to pass on the baton. The conductor and orchestra deliberately avoid the composer’s more familiar and expected symphonies. Instead, they propose two rare symphonic works from his late period, written with the assured hand of a true master of orchestral writing.
The addition of a work by Weinberg comes naturally: the young Polish Jew fled to the Soviet Union in 1939 ahead of the Nazi advance. Life in his adopted country was far from smooth, but he had the good fortune to form a close friendship with the older Shostakovich and to be deeply influenced by the ethos of his music. The Cello Fantasy reveals at every turn its elective affinity with the work of Dmitri Dmitrievich.
The programme is completed with the mature 25th of the 27 (!) symphonies that Nikolai Myaskovsky composed over a span of some forty years. Firmly devoted to the Russian symphonic tradition and a skilful handler (like Shostakovich) of orchestral colours, Myaskovsky guides us along the line that, like a clear trace drawn in the sand, links the symphonic universe of Tchaikovsky and the Mighty Handful with that of the undeniably greatest symphonist of the 20th century.
