Mirzoyan, Shostakovich & Weinberg: Censored Anthems (CD)

A Musical America New Artist and BBC Rising Star, Ian Niederhoffer is a fast-rising, young conductor. Here, together with his orchestra Parlando, he explores music as a tool of cultural resilience in the face of censorship, particularly within the Soviet Union. This eclectic program includes Shostakovich's Adagio from Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk, a work infamously censored after Stalin's disapproval, the Concertino for Violin and String Orchestra by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer whose career was shaped by persecution during Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, and Edvard Mirzoyan's Symphony for String Orchestra and Timpani, which is a powerful testament to Armenian cultural survival despite Soviet Russification. Inspired by Parlando's mission that "every concert tells a story", the album ends with three narrated tracks detailing Soviet censorship.