Shostakovich performed by Sarah Gait

On September 22, St John’s Smith Square will host a concert by cellist Sarah Gait. She will also be joined by pianist Simone Tavoni. They will perform a pairing of vivid and poignant works by composers struggling against artistic repression under the Soviet regime. The disturbed undercurrents of Shostakovich’s expansive 1934 cello sonata hint at the difficulties that followed in the composer’s life, starting with the official denouncement of his opera that very same year. 60 years later, in a fateful year for another composer, Schnittke was to be left paralysed by a series of strokes, shortly after completing one of his last works: the sparse and dramatically extreme second cello sonata.

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