Noseda/ London Symphony Orchestra
28th March 2019
An exploratory trumpet peeps over a wall. A bassoon hesitantly waddles into view. A cheeky clarinet offers a leering response. Within just a few bars at the start of Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Symphony, an impish character emerges – part Petrushka, part Till Eulenspiegel; a clown, a prankster. Written as a graduation exercise in Maximilian Steinberg’s composition class at the Petrograd Conservatory, it didn’t quite set the blueprint for Shostakovich’s later works, although humour – twisted into something more bitter – would become a recurrent thread in his compositional career.
Seong-Jin Cho, Gianandrea Noseda and the LSO
© Mark Allan | Barbican
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