About the Concert

Ambiguity

The terror and political pressure of Stalinist musical life hit Dmitri Shostakovich directly in 1936. The composer was only able to escape the open threat of consequences by pretending to be purified - the Fifth was an attempt at public rehabilitation. But the interpretation of the symphony is never clear-cut: is the military march in the first movement directed against external enemies or rather against the Soviet terror itself? Do the ländler and brass band in the second movement take Stalin's system ad absurdum? To whom is the moving lament of the third movement addressed? And doesn't the jubilation of the finale, as Shostakovich later claimed, seem "forced under threat"?

Organiser: Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden