Salt

Rossini liked to call the works he composed »in retirement« his »sins of old age« – most of them written not for the public, but for private soirées. The variations on Une larme are among them, which in turn inspired Jacques Offenbach, a virtuoso cellist himself. His Hommage à Rossini was discovered by cellist Raphaela Gromes in an archive. Donghoon Shin’s orchestral work Kafka’s Dream owes its existence to double inspiration: the title refers to a poem by the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges, who claimed that Kafka himself dictated it to him in a dream. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 sounds like the composer’s personal reflection upon his life under the repressions of Stalin’s dictatorship. Michael Sanderling is one of the most highly respected Shostakovich interpreters today, bestriding the narrow ground between vision and introspection, private message and public statement.