This year's International Shostakovich Festival Gohrisch, which will take place from 30 June to 3 July 2022 in the spa town of Gohrisch (Saxon Switzerland), will once again feature a world premiere by Dmitri Shostakovich: The choral piece "Glory to the Shipbuilders" was added to the programme at short notice and will be heard for the first time in a public concert performance. The a cappella work will be presented at the beginning of the opening concert on 30 June by members of the Saxon Vocal Ensemble under the direction of Matthias Jung in the Concert barn of Gohrisch.
The so far unknown work was discovered by the Russian musicologist Dr Olga Digonskaya, head archivist of the Moscow Shostakovich Archive. Over the past decades, she has brought countless Shostakovich manuscripts to light and was awarded the International Shostakovich Prize Gohrisch in 2021 for her services. The musicologist writes about her latest discovery: "Shostakovich's song 'Glory to the Shipbuilders' is virtually unknown, although its title occasionally appears in musical publications." After extensive archival research, she discovered that Shostakovich gave the song in 1964 as a gift to the workers of the important shipyard "Nosenko" in the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev for its 175th anniversary. Digonskaya discovered the complete text of the song by the Ukrainian poet Aleksander Uvarov and finally also sketches for the choral composition in Shostakovich's legacy: this clearly proves the authorship.
"We are extremely grateful that we can continue the history of Shostakovich premieres in Gohrisch with this new rarity," says Tobias Niederschlag, Artistic Director of the International Shostakovich Festival Gohrisch. In recent years, works by Shostakovich have already been regularly premiered in Gohrisch, including posthumous fragments from the opera "The Nose", an impromptu for viola and piano as well as numerous early piano works by the composer. "Olga Digonskaya already told me last year about an unknown choral piece, but there were still many unanswered questions. At the time, no one could have guessed that it was a work with a concrete reference to Ukraine, which has taken on a frighteningly topical relevance in the present time. In the opening concert of this year's festival we put it as a sort of 'motto'."
In addition to works by Dmitri Shostakovich, the programme of the Shostakovich Festival 2022 also includes a number of works by Ukrainian composers - above all by Valentin Silvestrov, who is personally expected in Gohrisch and will be awarded this year's Shostakovich Prize.
Further information and tickets at www.schostakowitsch-tage.de