Who was Dmitri Shostakovich? An intensely private person, the truth about this elusive composer has often evaded capture. While his music was much-performed during his lifetime, interest in the composer outside of the Soviet Union increased in the years after his death in 1975 – which sees its 50th anniversary next year – as Shostakovich’s music found new and increasing relevance with younger generations of musicians.
One such musician is Andris Nelsons, Music Director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Born in Latvia in 1978, his Shostakovich is the modern Shostakovich – and in 2025 Nelsons is convening a vast Shostakovich festival in Leipzig, presenting the composer’s complete cycle of symphonies, concertos, string quartets and other chamber offerings.
What does it mean to so thoroughly exhibit Shostakovich in this way? What is the meaning of his music in the present era? With memories of the Soviet Union fragmenting and fading – into nostalgia, myth and fiction – the most well-known and most listened-to Soviet composer could seem an artist without a country.
From 15th May to 1st June, the Leipzig Shostakovich Festival 2025 presents the composer’s music in an overarching, synoptic fashion. Symphonies are not presented in chronological order, neither the concertos or the chamber music. Instead, we come at Shostakovich as the total artist – almost from every angle simultaneously.
For instance: the opening concert, on Thursday 15th May, features two of Shostakovich’s most ebullient postwar works – the Festive Overture and the Second Piano Concerto – together with one of his most frightening, the Fourth Symphony, written in the midst of the great purge of the 1930s. The symphony was itself withdrawn from performance in 1936 and not heard until the 1960s.
Shostakovich, then, is a kind of artist both in time and out of time. The Fourth Symphony is a severe and terrifying work of the 1930s, but it also has expressive characteristics in keeping with much of Shostakovich’s output. This non-linear approach – seeing parallels across the composer’s works at the distance of many years – is the predominant ethos of the festival. Following the Fourth Symphony, on Friday 16th May Nelsons presents the Eleventh Symphony (1957), a work which itself looks back to 1905.
On Saturday 17th May, the wartime Eighth Symphony (1943) is presented alongside the distinctly post-war First Cello Concerto (1959), with the visiting Boston Symphony Orchestra and Gautier Capuçon. The cellist returns as soloist in the Second Cello Concerto (1966) on Monday with the specially-assembled Shostakovich Festival Orchestra, followed by the two piano trios and cello sonata (from the 1930s and 40s), performed by Capuçon with violinist Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider and pianist Daniil Trifonov. Trifonov is himself acting as soloist in the two piano concertos, and all three join together with Baiba Skride, who will be performing the violin concertos, for the Piano Quintet on Wednesday.
This all-star chamber music is partnered by Quatuor Danel’s cycle of Shostakovich’s string quartets. On Saturday 17th May they present the Second Quartet (1944) against the Ninth Quartet (1964) – pieces the product of significantly different periods and compositional processes. The Second Quartet was written in only a few days, whereas the Ninth’s composition was abortive, with sections partially destroyed – a whole movement, also performed on this occasion, was rediscovered in 2003. Quatuor Danel returns the next two weekends to complete the cycle, in a similarly non-chronological order.
On Saturday 24th May, when Quatuor Danel performs the Eighth Quartet, there is an unusual opportunity to immediately hear its arrangement for string orchestra by Rudolf Barshai. The piece works well on both scales – though its expressive effect is naturally different. A work dedicated by the composer on the score “to the victims of fascism and the war”, it is paired by Nelsons with the Seventh Symphony, the most famous of Shostakovich’s wartime compositions. Performed several times over the weekend by the combined forces of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Boston Symphony and Shostakovich Festival Orchestra, the piece is something of a marathon – or in this case, perhaps more of a relay race.
Sunday 25th May sees a highlight of the festival: a performance of Shostakovich’s operatic masterwork, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, conducted by Nelsons at Oper Leipzig, in a new production by Francisco Negrín. The chorus of Oper Leipzig join the Gewandhaus Orchestra on 28th May for Shostakovich’s late, emotive Thirteenth Symphony, which sets texts by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The opening poem was notably censored by the authorities, with Yevtushenko’s self-identification as a Jew excised. By pairing the symphony with the infamously banned Lady Macbeth, the plague of censorship which troubled Shostakovich’s composition across the decades is clearly demonstrated.
The festival concludes, on the final weekend, in typically non-chronological fashion, first with the Twelfth Symphony (1961), written in memory of Lenin and the October Revolution, positioned against the early Piano Concerto no. 1 in C minor for piano, trumpet and string orchestra (1933) and the Ninth Symphony (1945), Shostakovich’s sardonic and biting response to the conclusion of Great Patriotic War. Then on Sunday, the composer’s late Fourteenth Symphony (1969), which sets poems of Lorca, Apollinaire and Rilke in a tangled, semi-serial elegiac chamber style, is contrasted with the Tenth Symphony (1953), for much larger forces.
The Tenth is often portrayed as Shostakovich’s response to Stalinism – as attributed in Solomon Volkov’s much-disputed Testimony – yet aside from this purported commentary published after the composer’s death, there is no other corroborating evidence. In truth, the meaning of Shostakovich’s music can be uncertain – or, indeed, up-for-grabs. The changing reception of his music in the years since his death have proved this much: Shostakovich often means what we want him to mean. The 2025 Leipzig Shostakovich Festival would seem as good a time as any to discover exactly what this great Soviet artist means for us today.
The Leipzig Shostakovich Festival 2025 runs from 15th May–1st June.
This article was sponsored by Leipzig Tourism and Marketing.
