‘Shostakovich Festival : The Other Revolutionary’

There are few Soviet artists as exciting as Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer who, unlike Prokofiev and Stravinsky, never turned his back on his home country. Throughout his life, Shostakovich composed music that was performed by great Soviet state institutions: in 1917, the hopeful year of the revolution, during the Bolshevik regime, at the height of Stalinism and finally under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Extremely oppressive conditions sometimes cast a millstone around his neck, but Shostakovich kept composing, maintaining a delicate balance in his art between endorsing and rejecting the system, artistic self-expression and state propaganda. Ultimately, this resulted in a majestic œuvre so multi-layered that it remains controversial to this day. For four days, Bozar in cooperation with the Belgian National Orchestra, will be putting this fascinating Russian composer in the spotlight.