Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky

Besides works for performance in the concert hall and on the musical stage, Dmitri Shostakovich had a penchant for writing incidental music for the stage and film scores. Shakespeare's Hamlet accompanied him throughout his life, from the incidental music he first composed for the play in 1931-32, from which he compiled a famous and subsequently oft-performed suite, to the new incidental and film music he composed for the historically important cinematic version of the Shakespeare play directed by Grigori Kozintsev. At this concert, we will hear the suite from 1932.
The Peterburgskaya Gazeta devoted an entire feuilleton to the première of Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto in G minor: "A young man with the look of a Peterschule student appeared on stage; this young man was Sergei Prokofiev. He sat at the piano and it appeared that either he was busy dusting down the keyboard or blindly flapping at the keys with a hard, dry touch. The audience did not know what to make of it all. An indignant murmur of discontent was heard. […] The young artist finished his concerto with a mercilessly ear-splitting collective blast of brass. The listeners were scandalised […], modern-minded critics, on the other hand, were truly swimming in raptures. ‘Dazzling! Brilliant!' - they cried. ‘What temperament! What originality!'”
A lover of Russian folk music, the young Pyotr Tchaikovsky frequently quoted folk song motifs in his early works. The melodic material of his Symphony No. 2 is entirely based on folk songs, explaining why the work was given the nickname of the "Little Russian” or "Ukrainian” after the composer's death.