Ulster Orchestra: Shostakovich's Symphony No.8

Le bourgeois gentilhomme started life as the incidental music to Molière’s play and, much like Don Quixote (performed on 14 September), Strauss’s incidental music scores the main protagonists of the story as the tale unfolds. Written with a strong Baroque flavour, the romantic and comic misadventures of M. Jourdain’s desperate attempts at social climbing are humorously depicted in this charming work.

In February 1943, the German army was defeated at Stalingrad, causing huge pride and celebration across Russia. Shostakovich wasn’t entirely sure this was cause for joy – rather, he feared it would give Stalin licence to wield his terrible power more than before.

The Eighth Symphony was written in September of that year and in public, Shostakovich described it as "an attempt to reflect the terrible tragedy of war". However, in private he described it as a poem of suffering, stating that "the war brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven’t forgotten the terrible pre-war years".

Despite a positive reaction from audiences, the authorities attacked it for being anti-Soviet, and ultimately in 1948 it led to Shostakovich’s second denunciation. The work starts in su­ering and anguish, but Shostakovich was an optimist at heart and by its end, as he said himself: "All that is dark and evil rots away, and beauty triumphs."