Semyon Bychkov and Lisa Batiashvili perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto

In accordance with one of our season emphases, this evening focuses on Russian music: Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, composed after the composer experienced a phase of radical personal crises, is “unviolinistic”, Leopold Auer, to whom the work is dedicated, once stated. Lisa Batiashvili will make tangible that this is not the case at all. “The inhuman” is the theme of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, completed in 1943: he describes the brutality of war, exposes the empty pomp of military deployments, and finds moving tones for humanity’s sorrow in the face of horrors.