Pieter Wispelwey

This CD presents music composed by Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, two striking personalities from recent 20th-century musical history, who were also united by an intimate friendship. Britten had admired the music of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) since the 1930s, and since that time he had been influenced by it. This was the area of Shostakovich's best known and most often performer symphony, the Fifth, written in 1937. It was composed amidst the worst terror of the Stalinist regime, the paranoia, the culture of spying and betrayal, the pogroms and mass executions. Strangely enough, both the public and the Soviet government considered this symphony a mystery. Shostakovich is working with double meanings in this work: behind a charming smile, a hideous tragedy is taking place. It is this very symphony which Britten quotes at the beginning of this Second suite in d minor (1967), as a gesture of solidarity and sympathy.