A concert in Moscow on Shostakovich’s birthday

“Gergiev and Shostakovich – an example, rare nowadays, of the deep connection between a composer and a conductor,” wrote the German press following the final part of the project Gergiev’s Shostakovich in Munich. On Dmitry Shostakovich’s birthday, Valery Gergiev will present Moscow audiences with the indisputable masterpiece of the composer’s legacy for the first time – the Eighth Symphony, a monumental fresco written in a critical year of World War II which is dedicated to his congenial contemporary and “accomplice” interpreter Yevgeny Mravinsky.

The piano solo in Piano Concerto No 1 will be performed by Denis Matsuev, a long-standing and regular partner of the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra under Valery Gergiev. This early virtuoso work by Shostakovich, the score of which is remarkable for its abundance of “addressed” quotations of music from incredibly diverse eras and the aim of which is to demonstrate all the expressive possibilities of both instrument and soloist, comes from another sphere of the composer’s creativity. The performance of the concerto will be yet another tribute to Shostakovich, who himself once presented the work to the public to be judged.