Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Payare & Ólafsson

On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died. It was a game-changer for the composer who had spent decades running the gauntlet of the dictator’s musical whims: Dmitri Shostakovich.

Almost immediately, Shostakovich began work on a new symphony. Years of psychological torture at Stalin’s hand found their way into a score whose brooding desolation rears up in terror, despair and violence.

In the symphony’s cruel military march and sardonic scherzo, Shostakovich painted a musical portrait of Stalin himself. After years of censorship, a liberated composer unleashed his all in his most powerful symphony.

Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto has its own sense of freedom unleashed. In 1928, the demure French composer visited the jazz clubs of Harlem and found himself immediately inspired.

The result was a piano concerto drunk on the spirit of jazz – its wicked syncopated rhythms and schmoozing blue notes. Undoubtedly the pianist ‘of the moment’, Víkingur Ólafsson plays it here.