Shostakovich Festival Leipzig 2025
Shostakovich’s music has much in common with Beethoven and Mahler by sharing in their creativity the ideals of humanity, freedom and justice. It is no coincidence that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was composed like Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony during a time when Vienna and Leningrad were under siege. It is for the shared values of human dignity entwined in their magnificently expressive scores that more and more people are drawn to their music.
In the twentieth century, the music of Shostakovich has become ever more popular with his symphonies and concertos regularly performed around the world, however, it wasn’t always so, when I first began attending concerts, his music was rarely heard. That was during the Cold War, and only after he died in 1975 did his music become popular. There are several reasons for this – one was the new era of détente and enhanced cultural exchange between east and west, but his music required dedicated performers, and among the pioneers of Shostakovich’s music was Kurt Masur, who launched a series of the complete cycle of symphonies at the Leipzig Gewandhaus between 1976 and 1978 – in itself a historic event in Western music.
One of the major events of 2025 will be the Shostakovich Festival as Dr Skadl Jennicke, Councillor for Culture of the City of Leipzig writes, ‘I am delighted that in 2025 the Gewandhaus will, on every level, be pulling out all the stops in bringing all of Shostakovich’s symphonies as well as significant representation of his chamber music for strings to performance in just under three weeks with a stellar line-up of international artists.’
The Leipzig Gewandhaus invites the music world to Leipzig for one of the most comprehensive examinations of the works of Dmitri Shostakovich, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. The Gewandhausorchester, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Festival Orchestra founded especially for the festival, conducted by Gewandhauskapellmeister Andris Nelsons and Anna Rakitina, will perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s entire symphonic and concerto oeuvres. An unsurpassed roster of world-class artists will feature in the extensive chamber music series, while two performances of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Leipzig Opera, conducted by Nelsons, will complete the festival programme.
Andris Nelsons says that ‘Shostakovich’s music reflects all the facets and abysses of human existence: from anguish and darkness to biting irony and sarcasm, but also childlike, playful joy and burgeoning hope. Shostakovich allows us to share in his personal fate, in his fears and in all that threatened him – dangers that are a tragic reality for so many people today.’
The Gewandhaus General Director Andreas Schultz has also written of Shostakovich’s importance. ‘The composer, from whose dramatic biography much can be learned of the cultural-political machinations of dictatorships and extreme political parties, left a legacy of a great many remarkable works. In their inner conflict and drama, they reflect a global era marked by political extremes.’
The city of Leipzig has multiple connections with the Soviet Composer Dmitry Shostakovich, and it is vitally welcome that during an era of a revived Cold War and with war in eastern Europe that his music is to be commemorated. Shostakovich visited Leipzig as a juror in the International Bach Festival in 1950, and several years later he again visited Saxony, and was shocked by the destruction of the city of Dresden so much so he wrote his String Quartet No.8 dedicated to the ‘struggle against fascism’. He also wrote the score for a film about the war Five Days and Five Nights while resting in the spa town of Görlitz in eastern Saxony. Another significant influence on Shostakovich was the inspiration of J.S. Bach in his writing of the Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, one of the great piano masterpieces of the twentieth century.
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra has long championed the music of Shostakovich beginning in 1929 when Bruno Walter conducted the First Symphony, and just after the war, the Gewandhaus gave the German premieres of Symphony No.8 (1946), Symphony No.10 (1954) and the Symphony No.13 ‘Baby Yar’ (1974).
Leipzig is celebrating this great twentieth-century composer by arranging a retrospective of almost all his works ranging from all fifteen symphonies and string quartets. A unique feature of the festival will be concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra which will give three concerts and another three concerts shared with the Gewandhaus Orchestra of the ‘Leningrad Symphony’. The Festival Orchestra will be from students of the Mendelssohn Orchestra Academy and the Tanglewood Music Center and augmented by members of the Leipzig University of Music and the Theatre Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The performances of the fifteen string quartets will be shared between the Daniel Quartet and the Gewandhaus Quartett, and the Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues will be played by Yulianna Avdeeva, and the soloists in the six concertos will be Daniil Trifonov, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, Gautier Capucon, Antoine Tamestit, and Baiba Skride.
One novelty will be performances of the film and light music by the Salon Orchestra CAPPUCCINO in two concerts. The rarely heard songs and other vocal pieces will feature Elena Bashkirova, Elena Stikhina, Marina Prudenskaya, Bogdan Volkov, Günther Groissböck and the MDR Leipzig Radio Choir. There will be screenings of feature films Testimony, Altovaya Sonata, and Five Days and Five Nights. For those who wish to gain greater insight into his music, the 22nd Musicological Symposium will take place at the University of Music and Theatre between 19-21 May and daily talks on the works to be performed by Stephen Johnson and Ann-Katrin Zimmermann prior to the orchestral concerts.
The Shostakovich Festival will take place between 15 May and 1 June 2025.
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