Special Concert International Shostakovich Festival Gohrisch

Shostakovich’s two piano concertos are worlds apart. The lively humour of the first, which dates back to 1933, is reminiscent of music for the silent screen; indeed, the composer had once earned his living as a cinema pianist. The neoclassical second from 1957, on the other hand, seems unrooted in time. The composer’s own view was merciless: »I have finished a piano concerto that has no redeeming artistic merits«. Yet perhaps his words should be taken with a pinch of salt: Shostakovich composed the work for his son, and he did not hinder him from performing it. To help launch the Shostakovich Festival, Marie Jacquot is combining this Janus-faced pair of works with Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, which premiered in Paris in 1934, the year in which the composer fled Nazi Germany.