The pandemic messed up the plans for the International Shostakovich Days Gohrisch for two years, now Putin shouldn't also crush this musical gem in Saxon Switzerland.
Although there was no question of playing Russian music, according to Tobiasprecipitation, the festival's artistic director, the situation of the war had to be reacted to.
The composer Valentin Silvestrov, who fled to Berlin from the Ukraine in March, came into focus quite spontaneously.
The Shostakovich Days, founded in 2010 (the occasion was the eighth string quartet composed fifty years earlier in Gohrisch) never only had music by their namesake in the program, but always supplemented it with sound connotations.
The fact that this time the eighty-four-year-old Silvestrov came to the fore alongside Sofia Gubaidulina, who was six years older than her and couldn't travel due to illness, also had a correspondence in terms of content.
In their music, spiritual dimensions are almost sacred to both of them, and many of their works can be interpreted as invocations.
In the case of Silvestrov's cycles, which have meaningful titles such as "Kitsch Music", "Naive Music" and "Melodies of Moments", and which sounded in excerpts, the most economical internalization predominates,
For his life's work and certainly also as a sign of solidarity, the guest of honor, who has performed several times as an interpreter, received the International Shostakovich Gohrisch Prize at the weekend.
Sofia Gubaidulina received this honor in 2017.
Her first violin concerto "Offertorium" was heard this time in the special concert of the Sächsische Staatskapelle, the festival's sponsor orchestra, with the soloist Vadim Gluzman in the Dresden Semperoper.
This concert, conducted with verve and fervor by Omer Meir Wellber, was framed with excitement by Shostakovich's first and ninth symphonies - the cheeky youthful masterpiece and the sarcastic opus at the end of the World War in 1945.
The band also played in a chamber formation in the concert barn in Gohrisch, which belongs to an open agricultural cooperative whose straw has given way to music again this year.
Here the conductor Mikhail Jurowski, who died in March, had repeatedly held up the memory of Shostakovich and this year wanted to bring out his own concert version of his “Human Comedy”, which was related to Balzac.
Shostakovich created this balancing act of humor and cynicism in 1934, from then on the KGB "preserved" large parts of the material.
Now Dmitri Jurowski has conducted this wittily pointed world premiere in a concert dedicated to his father.
The fact that the Shostakovich Days can almost regularly come up with premieres and first performances of their namesake is due to the close cooperation with the Moscow Shostakovich Archive, which this year published a find from a Ukrainian newspaper that once dedicated to the shipyard workers of Mykolaiv contributed a choral piece Glory to the Shipwrights.
Never before, however, has the audience been able to experience a Shostakovich opera during the festival period.
As the last new production of the season, the Semperoper put "Die Nase" on the programme.
This, too, was a stroke of genius by the young firebrand, who, of course, was soon defamed in Stalinist cultural dictates as an “anarchist’s hand grenade”.