«At least that's how war sounds to my ears,» the composer Dmitri Shostakovich said about the first movement of his Seventh Symphony. It is not a soundtrack for a martial video game, but a music marked by a real war. It was composed in 1941, when Shostakovich's home town of Leningrad was besieged by the German Wehrmacht. Shostakovich did not write a heroic battle symphony, on the contrary: it was a work that captured the tragedy and inhumanity of war in sound. This music can sound radical and brutal, but also desperate and grotesque.

From a happier world, on the other hand, comes Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, which was composed before the outbreak of the Second World War and the Stalinist era of terror. The violinist Vadim Gluzman takes over the solo part and would like to dedicate this performance to the great violinist Isaac Stern, who would have turned 100 this year.