This concert features two 20th-century masters, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music serves as a profound witness to the shifting political and geographical landscapes of the Soviet Union.

While these works inhabit very different sound worlds, they are united by the composers’ shared experiences of state-sanctioned persecution and their empathetic focus on the individual caught in the gears of history.
The Lieutenant Kijé Suite (1934) marked a pivotal moment in Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union after nearly two decades in the West. Prokofiev took on this film project and adopted a more accessible style.

If Prokofiev used satire as a shield, Dmitri Shostakovich utilised the symphony’s scale to express the voice of the oppressed. Symphony No. 11 (“The Year 1905”), composed in 1957, is a monumental orchestral tapestry depicting the 1905 massacre, when Tsarist troops fired upon peaceful petitioners at St Petersburg’s Winter Palace.