Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg / Joanna Freszel / Andrey Boreyko

Underdog oder Komponistenliebling

Although esteemed and recognized by great colleagues such as Shostakovich, not least due to his independent musical expressivity and highly sensitive inventiveness, Alexander Lokshin has remained obscure. Hardly anyone knows the name of this composer, who was born in 1920 and left eleven symphonies for posterity, almost all of them based on writings from different cultures. »Margaret’s Songs« were written in 1973; Boris Pasternak had translated Goethe’s text into Russian. At the age of 19, Shostakovich wrote his first symphony – a stroke of genius which brought the composer immediate recognition. This was in the middle of the »Golden Twenties«, when the worlds of the West and the Soviet East enjoyed playing with masks and puppets and tales of grotesque, fairy-tale figures. Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Hindemith and many others had shown the way.