'This is the symphony that made me become a conductor,' says the Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony to BBC Music Magazine. 'When I was 11 or 12 I had an old LP at home… and I remember I listened a thousand times to that fugato in the middle of the Symphony.'
And now, as Karabits takes up the post of principal conductor at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, here's a chance to hear him in a blistering performance of the piece. Free with our September issue, and exclusive to BBC Music Magazine, is a performance of Shostakovich's work recorded live at the Lighthouse, Poole, last November.
'Karabits's sense of shape was infallible,' wrote critic Geoffrey Norris in The Telegraph. 'There was an ineluctable force to the music, whether at full charge or in the softest pianissimos, where the Bournemouth players revealed a finely honed blend of control and sensibility.'
The September issue is on sale from 6 August 2009 (UK – later for the US and other territories). Click here to find out more.
Audio clip: Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103 – Fourth Movement: The Tocsin
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