Gianandrea Noseda reflects on what Shostakovich's music means to him

As his recording of Shostakovich's symphonies with the LSO is released, conductor Gianandrea Noseda reflects on what this music means to him

Gianandrea Noseda:

Tackling the complete cycle of Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies requires a total immersion – not only into the music itself, but also into the historic tapestry of Tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary Russia.

The exclusively historical context in which this monumental symphonic corpus is rooted is Soviet, but its origins reach back into the world of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, as well as Glinka, Mussorgsky, and Borodin.

From these premises, a highly personal language develops, recognizable from Shostakovich’s Symphony No 1 to his Symphony No 15, encompassing a long stretch of the 'short century', from the years immediately following the October Revolution to the Vietnam War. [...]

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