Tchaikovsky / Shostakovich: Symphony No. 6

Two Sixth Symphonies, both by Russian composers, both premiered in St. Petersburg and Leningrad respectively: They are musical confessions of artists who had to conceal their true nature and thoughts in their political and social reality and dared to express the profound and unspeakable through their music. Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony is a "musical confession of the soul" that "bursting with the residue of life, pours out in sounds". The program of the Sixth, later also called "Pathétique", which only began its triumphant journey after the death of its creator, was "to remain a riddle to everyone". Shostakovich's Sixth also irritates through its lack of symphonic convention, for example the absence of a jubilant finale. Despite observation by Stalinist-repressive cultural policy, Shostakovich released that Sixth in 1939, which carried the audience away in storms of applause, but left critics and ideologues shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads and was considered a "body without a head". Shostakovich's symphonic masterpiece was premiered by Evgeny Mravinsky, whose student and assistant Mariss Jansons later became. Thus the circle closes...