Name: Testimony
Start: 2019-06-26T00:00:00+01:00
End: 2019-06-29T23:59:59+01:00
Location: Irish Tour

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Testimony

26th June 2019 - 29th June 2019

Testimony

June 2019

Irish Chamber Orchestra
Katherine Hunka Director
Barry McGovern Actor

Dmitri Shostakovich was the most brilliant of all Soviet composers – and the most hotly debated. An isolated figure, working under one of the 20th century’s most terrifying dictatorships, his music is emotional, controversial, misunderstood – and a guaranteed hall-filler.

This fascinating piece of music theatre captures the powerful memoirs of an ailing Shostakovich, dictated to a young Russian musicologist, Solomon Volkov. TESTIMONY was an international bestseller in 1979 and remains an astonishingly divisive read. The ICO reflects on the life of Shostakovich his respect for his teacher Aleksandr Glazunov, his relationship with Josef Stalin and with peers Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinksy in Russia.

The 8^thQuartet or Chamber Symphony is the most personal of Shostakovich’s works, dedicated ‘to the memory of myself’. A gripping portrayal of the brutality of conflict, its jagged, dynamic rhythms contrast with elegiac outer movements that never fail to move the listener.

Barry McGovern, one of Ireland’s most skilled and experienced actors, has had a long career in theatre, film, television and radio. He delivers extracts from Testimony interspersed with emotive music by Russian greats.