28-04-2025
RPO/Petrenko review — a five-star, piercingly good performance
★★★★★The idea of illustrating Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad, conjures distasteful images: Panzer divisions confronting the Red Army while the composer's wartime symphony gradually detonates around you. But the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's contribution to the Southbank Centre's Multitudes festival — a Royal Festival Hall event called Symphony of Shadows — defied expectations. I found it both disturbing and engrossing.
That the event's architects — conductor Vasily Petrenko and art director Kirill Serebrennikov — are both estranged from their native Russia is surely not a coincidence. (Next month the two tackle another Russian icon, the opera Boris Godunov, in Amsterdam.) Introducing the event, Petrenko reminded the audience of Shostakovich's complicated relationship to his homeland; the Leningrad Symphony, premiered as propaganda for Stalin and
