Symfonisch Orkest van de Sint-Petersburg Philharmonia - Alexander Dmitrijev

The St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra is presenting a fully Russian programme. It is true that Tchaikovsky's 'Slavonic March', opus 31, is not his most refined work, but it does show how Tchaikovsky was able to play on the emotions of his audience better than anyone else. In recent decades Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto has been played to death as the perfect contest showpiece. However, the romantically idealist performances one usually gets to hear in a contest only do justice to a single aspect of this astonishingly many-sided work. In addition to supreme virtuosity, it also provides stillness and introversion, contained in a tight structure with rhythmical and melodic links between its parts. Shostakovich's 'Tenth Symphony' dates from 1953. It was his first large-scale work after the death of Stalin. It has already been suggested many times that this symphony is possibly a reflection on this historical event - the sharp, biting scherzo might for example be a sarcastic portrait of the dictator. However this purely speculative interpretation is much less interesting than the observation that in this symphony Shostakovich links back to earlier, more classically-oriented works such as the Fifth Symphony, with which this Tenth shares its classical four-part structure.