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For Sergei Rachmaninov the Second Piano Concerto was the beginning of a new life after a deep creative crisis. At the end of the nineteenth century the composer had lived through the collapse of his First Symphony in St Petersburg. Shortly afterwards the First Piano Concerto, presented in London, also proved a failure. Disheartened and convinced that he could no longer compose, Rachmaninov fell into an acute depression that led him to the care of Dr Nikolai Dahl, an expert in hypnosis. From that treatment came an artistic rebirth, translated into the Second Concerto, which is not by chance dedicated to the doctor in gratitude. First performed in Moscow in 1901, this masterpiece has become the very symbol of the literature for piano and orchestra, a rare case in which the extreme virtuosity demanded of the soloist coincides with a lyrical and dramatic expressiveness of absolute, modern eloquence — as famous pop songs indebted to the themes Rachmaninov scattered so generously through the score have also shown.
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 seems to foretell the fate of Shostakovich, «the genius gagged by authority». A refined artist, driven by the desire for independence and originality, found himself facing the brutal power of Stalin and his paranoid, devouring dictatorship, which despised works of art not accessible to a mass public and preferred to turn artists into instruments of propaganda, publicists for his image and curators of his personality cult. The Fourth Symphony runs along this cataclysm: Shostakovich wrote it in the two years that changed his life, from 1934 to 1936, the span that took him from the resounding success of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District to its condemnation in the pages of Pravda. That is why he chose to keep this symphonic masterpiece in a drawer; it appeared only in 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death.
Orchestra of Teatro Comunale di Bologna