Shostakovich’s late vocal output unwinds before the listener a rich inner world animated by powerful invention, yielding an effect achieved without the deployment of anything like extravagant means. The cycle presented here, dating from the last year of the composer’s life, sets the verse of Marina Tsvetaeva, a Russian poet with a fate incredibly tragic if lamentably not exceptional in her life’s place and time. Tsvetaeva spent part of her life in exile (in Paris, and for some time also in Prague), suffered from extreme penury, saw her child die from hunger. Her husband was executed in Russia, and eventually she herself chose to take her own life. In terms of content, these poems deal with the poet’s private life (the first two songs), with literature and poetry, and the last one renders tribute to another persecuted Russian woman poet, Anna Akhmatova.

The song genre plays a crucial part in the work of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), in its various manifestations including song cycles for voice and piano, or with orchestral accompaniment, or as parts of several of his symphonies. While the idea of setting verse by the early-19^th-century poet, Friedrich Rückert, originally struck many Mahler’s contemporaries, living in Vienna which was then bristling with modernistic tendencies in art, as virtually anachronistic, the composer evidently found in these lines abounding in natural imagery and psychological depth, material he was eager to exploit. The series’ five songs were not originally intended to make up a single whole, and ever since their making interpreters have continued to modify their order.

Work on his second (and last) piano sonata proved far from simple for Dmitri Shostakovich. He set out to write this piano opus after a decade-long pause. He wrote it during the Second World War, at a time when he and his family were evacuated, along with many other artists, to the city of Samara in southwestern Russia. The composition’s reception was ambiguous, and finally, in the era of the implementation of the notorious Zhdanov doctrine, it ended up on the black list of prohibited works. The composer personally performed this sonata at the Prague Spring Festival in 1947.

Text: Dita Hradecká