Sol Gabetta
Klaus Mäkelä Dmitri Shostakovich
Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Julia Perry (1924–1979) grew up in Kentucky and Ohio, and stood out at a young age as a talented singer and violinist. As a composer, she combined elements from African-American musical heritage and European classical music. During the 1950s, she spent several years in Italy and France, and studied composition under Luigi Dallapiccola and Nadia Boulanger. In 1952, she composed the lively and contrast-filled Short Piece for Orchestra.

Few individual musicians had a greater influence on the orchestral music of the 20th century than the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Sergei Prokofiev composed a cello sonata for the then 22-year-old Rostropovich in 1949, and a cello concerto three years later. Dmitri Shostakovich was greatly excited by Prokofiev’s cello concerto and used it as an inspiration for his 1959 Cello Concerto No. 1, the first of two concerti he composed for Rostropovich.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840−1893) started work on his Symphony No. 6 in February 1893, and completed it in August of the same year. He wrote to his nephew about it: “... I absolutely consider it to be the best, and in particular, the most sincere of all my creations. I love it as I have never loved any of my other musical offspring ...” He himself conducted its first-ever performance in St Petersburg on 28 October 1893. The symphony quickly became enormously popular, but Tchaikovsky never got to see its success – he died suddenly just nine days later. The Symphony No. 6 was entitled the Pathetique – literally, in the original Russian, “Passionate”.