The Anglo-Russian alliance.

Britain’s Britten and Russia’s Shostakovich and Prokofiev, the latter by Frank Peter Zimmermann, one of the world’s greatest soloists.

The Russian Dmitri Shostakovich and Britain’s Benjamin Britten are two central authors in our season. The two were good friends and, being contemporary, lived World War II from very different situations, using their music to condemn the horrors of the war. Shostakovich did it with various symphonies of terrible violence lending expression to the pain and brutality of war. Symphony no. 5, written shortly prior to the start of the fighting, is one of his best-known creations.

For his part, Britten the pacifist adopted a reflexive and humanistic stance, as can be seen in his Sinfonia da Requiem, completed in 1940. Robert Treviño will present these two complementary points of view and will also welcome one of today’s great violinists, Frank Peter Zimmermann, in Prokofiev’s Violin concerto no. 1.