»Macht und Musik« / »Power and Music«

To resist or to conform? For Dmitri Shostakovich one thing was clear: »Real music always reflects feelings, moods, passions, thoughts and ideas, the longing for peace and freedom, and the battle for them.« In a period of rigid censorship, the great Russian modernist composer constantly ran afoul of Stalin’s dictatorship and its party officials, and came under pressure from the doctrines of »Socialist Realism«. Despite that, he obstinately went his own way. This concert combines great chamber music with excerpts from Julian Barnes’s recent Shostakovich novel »The Noise of Time« – read in German by multi-award-winning reciter and music lover Hans-Jürgen Schatz.