Shostakovich, Schönberg, and Mendelssohn with the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España

David Afkham returns to the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España, where he is Chief Conductor and Artistic Director, on January 31 and February 1 and 2 for a powerful program that reflects on the horrors of the second World War. 

It features Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8, written in 1943, when the Soviet victory at Stalingrad signaled the German defeat, a somber and surprising work that captures the desolation of war. Felix Mendelssohn’s choral and orchestral setting of Psalm 114 masterfully combines reverence and jubilant energy to illustrate the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Written in 1948 for orchestra, men’s chorus, and solo narrator, Arnold Schönberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw tells the story of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, a powerful work that Novelist Milan Kundera considered “the greatest monument” ever dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. Bass Lars Woldt will narrate.