Roukens, Adams and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4

Delusions of grandeur

That Dmitri Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony just before its premiere in 1936 had everything to do with Stalin and a damning article in Pravda . At the time, Shostakovich thought his symphony was 'full of delusions of grandeur'. When the work was finally premiered in the sixties, it turned out that he had not changed a single note. Trusted Matinee guest Vasily Petrenko and the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra show that Shostakovich was right to do so.

String Quartet

The ears have already been warmed up by 'a colossal twenty-five-minute scherzo', as John Adams called his Absolute Jest for string quartet and symphony orchestra. The work, written in 2012 for the centenary of the San Francisco Symphony, regularly refers to Beethoven's late string quartets. The Dudok Quartet, the 'soloist' on duty, has already established the quartet sound with the first part of Roukens' Fourth String Quartet , 'a beautiful piece in which the finite and the infinite meet', according to NRC .