War and Peace

What price victory? Prokofiev wrote his Sixth Symphony in the aftermath of the Second World War but although it tells of an epic struggle, it’s far from clear that it ends in anything as simple as triumph. For some listeners, it’s his greatest achievement, and as you’d expect from Vladimir Jurowski, it’s the climax of a whole evening of music that asks as many questions as it answers. Gil Shaham brings all his peerless expressive power to Hindemith’s fiery wartime Violin Concerto, and Jurowski opens in the brooding, intensely dramatic imaginative world of Galina Ustvolskaya – a Soviet composer who refused to be suppressed.