Stavanger Symphony Orchestra
Andris Poga Pyotr Tschaikovsky
Dmitri Schostakovich

In the spring of 1878 Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) travelled to Clarens, a Swiss resort located on the shores of Lake Geneva. Together with a friend who played violin he played through Édouard Lalo’s violin concerto Symphonie espagnole, which premiered in 1875. Within a few weeks of this he wrote his own Violin Concerto in D major. Several years passed before it was performed, and it took even longer before it was a success. However, today it is one of the most popular violin concertos.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s (1906–1975) trajectory as a Soviet composer was destined to be significantly more complicated. While official state honours were bestowed on Gliere during the 1930s, Shostakovich fell into disfavour of Josef Stalin, the mighty ruler of the Soviet Union. In the course of the next decades, official reactions to his music varied strongly, and it was only following Stalin’s death in 1953 that his work was officially acknowledged. He remained terrified of reprisals for the rest of his life.

The background to his Symphony No. 10 is strongly contested – did he compose the symphony before or after Stalin’s death in the spring of 1953? And to what extent is it about Stalin and his era? The violent second movement has been claimed to be a depiction of Stalin himself – references to brutality and suppression are in clear evidence in the intense music. There was no doubting the artistic quality of the work, and the symphony was a great success, both in Russia and in the West. And if parts of the symphony seem oppressively dark, it also contains flickers of hope.