Summer night concert Kleinhapl & Friends

Kleinhapl and Friends Summer Night Concert
“About Shostakovich – A Dialogue between Dmitri Shostakovich and a Stranger”

This year’s Kleinhapl and Friends Summer Night Concert is all about Dmitri Shostakovich.
Dmitri Shostakovich sits before a chessboard, lost in thought and distracted. A stranger appears and asks him abruptly: “Fancy a game?” During this chess game, the stranger strikes up a conversation that grows increasingly mysterious. Who is this woman? Where does she come from? How does she know all the intimate details of Shostakovich’s life? With her increasingly relentless questions, she reminds Shostakovich more and more of his former love, his musical conscience, his pupil, the composer Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya. Has she sent the stranger after him? A belated act of revenge?

The stranger’s questions are the very ones that have preoccupied him for years and which Galina Ivanovna had already asked him: How would his life have turned out if he had kept his distance from politics in his youth? Was he really a state artist loyal to the regime and conformist? Was his joining the party truly inevitable? Had he lost himself as a composer? Shostakovich is spellbound. He is unable to end the conversation; Shostakovich begins to justify himself.

But suddenly he realises he is alone. Where has the stranger gone? All the chess pieces lie before Shostakovich, as if no one had ever sat at his table. The stranger has vanished into thin air, and with her the chair. Was Shostakovich, in the end, talking to himself? To his own conscience? And did he perhaps checkmate himself?

Cast:
Shostakovich: Karl Markovics
Stranger: Dörte Lyssewski
Violin: Peter Szasz
Cello: Friedrich Kleinhapl
Piano: Kim Barbier

Tickets: available online via ticketzentrum.at and at the Ticketzentrum, Kaiser-Josef-Platz 10, 8010 Graz

Public accessibility: Tram 3, 5 I Stop: Schloßbergbahn then take the Schloßbergbahn to the mountain station