Evgeny Kissin, Gidon Kremer, Gautier Capuçon & Maxim Rysanov

2025 is the year to commemorate a great composer: Dmitri Dmitry Shostakovich. He died exactly 50 years ago, making this the perfect time for a splendid project. The three sonatas he wrote for string instruments in one concerto - for violin, viola and cello. With Evgeny Kissin behind the piano, we have perhaps the best pianist in the world. He gathered three top musicians around him to add lustre to Shostakovich's sonatas. This is how to start a Shostakovich year!

This trio of sonatas is somewhat of a cross-section of Shostakovich's vast oeuvre. And you can hear that indeed. The composer was only 34 when he wrote his 1940 cello sonata. He fell in love with a young student in Leningrad and the much-played work became particularly vivacious and lively. From much later is then the 1968 violin sonata. He dedicated it to David Oistrach, at the time the greatest Russian violinist. The viola sonata would be Shostakovich's last work; he wrote it in a Moscow hospital and completed it three days before his death on 9 August 1975. Real late Shostakovich: many shades of black. So intensely rich is this score that it was also arranged for ensemble. The performance in Eindhoven of these three sonatas is unique: it is the only concert in the Netherlands and Belgium.