The musical works featured in this concert are connected by their honest expression of the profound inner life of humankind. They promise a journey into the souls of 20th century composers which they reveal to us in their expressive sound worlds and allow us to share. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 comes across like a great, emotional exhalation after decades of severe art censorship by Joseph Stalin’s regime. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s luxuriating Symphony No. 3 was created in his US-American exile and it reveals a great deal of the Russian composer’s longing for home. A lost grip on reality is the theme of Bohuslav Martinů’s opera Julietta; its appendant orchestra suite evokes an endless roaming through dream worlds. Martinů’s musical language is even more personal and intimate here than in his opera The Greek Passion, which will premiere at the State Opera in April. read less