Russian Masterworks

Epic, towering, all-encompassing, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto holds one of the most achingly beautiful slow movements of all time. From heroic grandeur to fearful uncertainty, Shostakovich penned his Fifth Symphony amidst a Stalinist regime of terror. The music is full of cryptic messages, with Shostakovich recalling in his memoirs that the coda’s seeming sense of victory for a Russia under Stalin “is as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing”.