Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin: Vladimir Jurowski dirigiert Lachenmann und Schostakowitsch

"Is this the Lord of a Thousand Empires, who sows the world with corpses?" asks Lord Byron, referring to Napoleon Bonaparte. Arnold Schönberg thinks of Adolf Hitler in 1942. Musical rebellion against injustice and violence in the 20th century.

In 1905, the Russian Tsar had the starving crowds singing chorales and hymns shot in front of the Winter Palace; Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 is a monument to them. 37 years later, the German National Socialists murdered the population of the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky and razed them to the ground. Bohuslav Martinů quotes the Czech St. Wenceslas chorale from the 12th century, the ancient Czech resistance hymn, in memory of the more than 2,000 victims. Josef Suk used the same chorale in 1914 to express his hope for a self-determined Czech Republic after the end of the First World War.

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