In the song cycle Songs and Dances of Death for bass and piano, the great Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky gives voice to the tragic, premature deaths so common in his time: the loss of a small child, the passing of an adolescent girl, or the devastations of war.
In 1969, Shostakovich—already feeling the erosion of time—returned to this work, which he had orchestrated a few years earlier, in 1962. It is as if the Soviet composer were picking up the thread exactly where his compatriot had left it almost a century before.
The Fourteenth Symphony—scored sparingly for string orchestra and percussion interacting with bass and soprano—is not a conventional symphony: eleven songs on the theme of untimely death, set to poems by Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wilhelm Küchelbecker, create the work’s dark and unrelenting atmosphere.
The symphony will be performed in the composer’s version for piano, voices, and percussion, featuring bass Alexandros Stavrakakis, winner of the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition and already enjoying a flourishing international career.
And, of course, the great surprise comes in the person of Viktoria Postnikova: a grande dame of the piano who, in one of her now rare appearances, brings with her the full legacy of the Russian and Soviet school—an interpretation that captivated audiences only a few months ago at the Verbier International Festival.
Greek surtitles will be provided.
