Festival Opening Concert

It is the same concerto the composer played on this stage in 1934, months after the ink was dry. Its two initially antagonistic voices ultimately become partners — an apt opening gesture for a festival founded on encounter, and for a second season whose opening programme is built around works for two.

Nor is the conductor accidental. Dmitry Sitkovetsky was born in Baku in 1954, the son of the violinist Julian Sitkovetsky and of Bella Davidovich. After leaving the Soviet Union at twenty-two, he built an international career as violinist, conductor and transcriber, and later founded a biennial festival in his native city. He returns to open this edition and to conduct the Tenth Symphony beneath Kentridge's film.He also leads the BIAF Festival Orchestra, bringing together the Azerbaijan State Chamber Orchestra named after Gara Garayev with invited international musicians for the occasion — the guest principle applied inside the pit rather than only on the stage.

Shostakovich's association with the city became a school. Gara Garayev and Jovdat Hajiyev — the two composers who between them define twentieth-century Azerbaijani music — studied composition with him at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1940s, and the teacher-student relationship turned into a friendship that lasted until his death. Uzeyir Hajibeyli had already performed the founding act in 1908; what Shostakovich supplied was the next step, the technique and the licence for a national school to become a modern one. Garayev's Seven Beauties (1952), after Nizami, did for Azerbaijani ballet what Hajibeyli had done for opera.

Shostakovich came back in 1949, in 1952 to hear Seven Beauties and to play his own music at the Philharmonic, and in 1956 for the republic's first congress of composers. Spanning three centuries, the programme moves from Vivaldi and Bach to Shostakovich, Fikret Amirov and Elmira Nazirova. Nazirova's Andante Cantabile carries a direct link to Shostakovich — she studied composition with him at the Moscow Conservatory — while Amirov's Symphony for String Orchestra, To the Memory of Nizami brings another distinctive Azerbaijani voice to the evening.

Dramatic intensity and subtle irony, lyrical depth and virtuoso brilliance shape an evening in which music from different eras and traditions enters into dialogue with Shostakovich's artistic world.