Oh To Believe in Another World

William Kentridge’s film has its UK premiere with the Shostakovich symphony that inspired it, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop.

Join us for a powerful, political evening bringing together Kentridge’s film and Shostakovich’s subversive Symphony No.10, with both works sharing themes of freedom against totalitarianism and oppression.

Oh To Believe in Another World is an animated film to ‘illuminate and honour’ Shostakovich’s powerful Symphony No.10, which premiered a few months after the death of Stalin and expresses the violence and dread of Russia’s years under the dictator’s regime.
Using collage, puppets and masked actors, artist William Kentridge creates a dream-like ‘Soviet museum’ to accompany the symphony, featuring a cast of characters including Lenin, Stalin and Shostakovich himself.

South African visual artist and filmmaker William Kentridge works in many disciplines, including drawing, sculpture, textiles, dance and opera – a 2022 retrospective at the Royal Academy simply called him a ‘global creative powerhouse.’ Much of his work addresses the politics of oppression in his native South Africa and around the world.

To complement Shostakovich’s symphony, conductor Marin Alsop has chosen Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

Bernstein was a huge admirer of Shostakovich, both as a composer and on a personal level. Commissioned by the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, these hopeful and life-affirming psalm settings are a plea for peace. And at their commissioner’s request, there’s more than a dash of West Side Story about their upbeat rhythms and youthful energy.

Kentridge’s film is a retrospective look at the four decades of the 1920s – 1950s, from the perspective of 1953 when Stalin died and the first performance of the symphony was presented. Set inside what appears to be an abandoned Soviet museum, which in fact is made of cardboard, on the table in the artist’s studio, we move through the different halls of the museum, encountering Lenin, Trotsky, Mayakovsky and Stalin.

William Kentridge (born Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions. He creates works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, yet maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty.

Presented by the Southbank Centre and Philharmonia Orchestra