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Shostakovich composed his First Concerto for cello and orchestra in 1959 in only forty days, and dedicated it to the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, with whom he shared an understanding that needed no words, as a famous episode from the years when the two musicians lived in the same housing complex shows. One day Dmitri — who had been free of Stalin’s shadow for only six years, though not yet of the suffocating embrace of the Soviet regime — telephoned the cellist: «Come over, I need to talk». Mstislav rushed to the flat and found Shostakovich at the kitchen table, silent. He stayed like that for an hour. Then, suddenly, the composer said: «Thank you for coming». The Concerto no. 1 — an absolute peak of virtuosity and expression in the genre — was shown to Rostropovich at the end of September 1959. In four days the cellist learned every passage by heart and performed it on 4 October in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. Two days later the Concerto had already been recorded, in a memorable disc conducted by Alexander Gauk.

«A hymn to free and happy Man, to his powerful forces, to his pure and noble spirit». So Sergei Prokofiev described his Fifth Symphony, finished in barely a month’s work in the summer of 1944, in a house 300 kilometres from Moscow put at his disposal by the Union of Soviet Composers. Besides Prokofiev himself, his colleagues Khachaturian and Shostakovich were staying there, and so were the first to hear the symphony in its piano version. The biting gesture, the chasing of fragments flung into the air, the grotesque humour: all the most typical traits of Prokofiev’s writing are here, in a symphony that cries out, piercingly and in anguish, the senselessness of war, and also a sense of estrangement before the hysterical enthusiasm of military parades. The first performance, on 13 January 1945, took place in a Moscow looking with optimism towards the imminent end of the conflict. Barely two weeks later the Red Army would enter Auschwitz and discover new depths of horror.