"Having already recorded Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev with them, what a pleasure it is to work with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky again for this album dedicated to Shostakovich!

"I grew up with these concertos – each has a very different spirit and yet a common intensity and a Slavic depth which really speaks to me.

"I am very happy to share the powerful atmosphere of these concerts, from Paris to Saint-Petersburg, made unforgettable by the incredibly inspiring sound of Valery Gergiev and his orchestra."

Gautier Capuçon's new recording of the Shostakovich Cello Concertos, with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra, is out 30 October.

Gautier Capuçon's new recording of the Shostakovich Cello Concertos, with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra, is out 30 October.

Dmitri Shostakovich received numerous accolades throughout his career but also experienced falls from grace and periods in obscurity. How many times did this artist and man of integrity, who was repeatedly ground down by Stalin’s regime but then rehabilitated, bow his head in acknowledgement of guilt? Like Sergey Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian, he fell victim to the relentless cultural policies of Andrey Zhdanov and was forced into humiliating self-criticism at the behest of Tikhon Khrennikov, secretary general of the Union of Soviet Composers which he joined in 1932.

After a period of withdrawal and soon after he had been awarded the Lenin Prize, Shostakovich came across Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante for Cello Op. 125. Soon afterwards, in the summer of 1959, he completed work on his First Cello Concerto in E flat major Op. 107. This work of heroic drama and formidable technical difficulty is in the style of a symphonic poem with the cello as the central figure. Regarded as one of his best concertante works, it is dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, a former student in Shostakovich’s orchestration class at the Moscow conservatoire with whom the composer formed a bond which was to link teacher and student for three decades. Rostropovich advised Shostakovich as he worked on the concerto and it was Rostropovich who gave the first performance in Leningrad on 4 October 1959.

The composer constructed the score around a musical motif based on the German transliteration of his own initials, DSCH, which in German musical notation becomes DEsCH, or in the English-language scale, D, E-flat, C and B. In the long, remarkable cadenza, Shostakovich employed a free, improvisational style making full use of all the cello’s expressive and technical range within an ever-tense and questioning mood. The final movement's aggressive rhythms in the orchestra set the scene for the return of the four notes of the DSCH theme, in keeping with the cyclical structure of the work whose final notes are quite explosive.

Mstislav Rostropovich revealed that, in a sardonic nod to the “Little father of the peoples”, Shostakovich had buried in the orchestral part the refrain of a Georgian melody which Stalin loved.

Shostakovich's two cello concertos are separated by a gap of seven years. Completed on 27 April 1966, apparently with some difficulty, Concerto No. 2 is more inward looking, darker and more somber than the first, but equally charged with emotion. As Charles Koechlin once wrote: “Throughout his life, Shostakovich was always looking for something. He reaches new heights when he is free, at liberty to follow his own inspiration.”

Mstislav Rostropovich, who premiered this concerto at the Moscow conservatoire on 25 September 1966, always worked tirelessly to bring the music of Shostakovich to the attention of the world at large, as he had promised the composer he would before leaving the USSR. This is testimony to the bond between the great cellist, himself a victim of dreadful purges, and a truly Russian composer, known for his reserved and self-effacing nature, who was somewhat enigmatic and often the victim of prejudice and whose music reflects his own anxiety, solitude and hopes.

Despite the difficulties caused by his own independence of spirit, Shostakovich never considered leaving his homeland for good, yet “no artist who achieved such fame in his own country and throughout the world ever lived with such suffering and in such constant fear and terror”.

Author: André Lischke (translation: Adélaïde de Place)

“Capuçon and Gergiev deliver some grand and glorious moments,” wrote Gramophone when the French cellist Gautier Capuçon and the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev last collaborated on a disc of Russian music for Erato – works by Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, released in 2010. The Daily Telegraph found that “Capuçon [plays] with a blend of impeccable taste, Romantic ardour and technical aplomb ... Whether quizzical, rapturous, pensive or demonstrative, Capuçon has full measure of [the music] here in a performance of impressive stature.”

Now, the two musicians - whose collaboration, again in Gramophone’s words, “was bound to strike sparks” – have come together for two live recordings, made in December 2013 at Paris’s Salle Pleyel and June 2014 at St. Petersbourg’s Mariinsky Thetre with the powerhouse Mariinsky Orchestra.

The works in question are Dmitri Shostakovich’s cello concertos Nos 1 and 2, both of which were written for Mstislav Rostropovich. The first was composed in 1959 (a year after the Central Committee of the Communist Party admitted that in 1948 there had been unjust condemnation of Shostakovich and other composers as ‘Formalist’), the second in 1966.

The two concertos are different in spirit and shape: the first is often assertive and energetic, and features a huge cadenza for the cello that is almost a movement in its own right, while the second is introspective and enigmatic. When Capuçon played the Concerto No.1 in New York in early 2014, the New York Times opined: “Mr Capuçon played the work beautifully, negotiating its difficulties with seeming ease ... his elegance paid dividends ..., especially in the meditative Moderato and the brooding opening of the cadenza.”

Gautier Capuçon has described his passion for playing in the French magazine Cadences: “Music works like a drug. You have an adrenaline moment on stage, but at the same time it’s enormously intimate, because you are naked up there. It makes an explosive cocktail!”

Shostakovich Cello Concertos with Gautier Capuçon, the Mariinsky Orchestra and maestro Valery Gergiev, is available for pre-order now, release date 30 October.

Russia's Mariinsky Theatre Musical Director Valery Gergiev conducts Tchaikovsky's glorious score in this enchanting, traditional production of Christmas favourite The Nutcracker. Vainonen's stunning choreography (from 1934, one of the oldest versions still performed today) is complemented by Simon Virsaladze's wonderfully colourful designs, and the roles of Masha and her Nutcracker Prince are danced by two of the Mariinsky's award-winning international soloists, all of which make this as magical and memorable a Christmas treat as ever.

Premiered on 18 December 1892 at the very same Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, The Nutcracker was Tchaikovsky's last ballet. It took him a year to compose what remains today one of the most popular examples of ballet music and Tchaikovsky's most celebrated work.

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