Censored Anthems

Together with his orchestra Parlando, young conductor Ian Niederhoffer explores how music functioned as a means of cultural resistance against censorship. The focus of his album is on composers who faced restrictions in the Soviet Union and the first work on the album is Shostakovich's Adagio from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a work that was censored after Stalin's disapproval. This is followed by the Concertino for violin and string orchestra by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer whose career was marked by persecution during Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, and Edvard Mirzoyan's Symphony for string orchestra and timpani, which is an impressive testimony to the survival of Armenian culture despite Soviet Russification. The motto of the Parlando orchestra, "every concert tells a story", is taken literally on this album and supplemented with three tracks. Ian Niederhoffer provides three short commentaries (in English) for each piece and uses musical elements to explain how censorship intervened in the compositions.