The first concert with new Musical Director David Young brings an exciting Russian flavour and another first. The Reading Bach Choir is delighted to be performing the complete set of Shostakovich’s Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets. This is possibly the first time the complete set has been performed in Britain and music has been specially printed.
Rarely performed, it was written in the early 1950s, before the death of Stalin. Shostakovich cherry-picked a series of early 20th century propaganda texts, setting them to music rich with folk tunes, populist verve and a dramatists’ eye for setting text.
This concert is on Remembrance Day and marks 100 years since the end of the 1917 Russian Revolution. This sparked the Russian Civil War and eventually led to the creation of the USSR. Performing this concert almost 100 years to the day since the end of the October Revolution of 1917 is going to be a really outstanding occasion.
Also included are works by some of the greatest composers of the Russian sacred tradition. Tchaikovsky, Chesnokov, Gretchaninov, and Rachmaninov.
