Does sound define a city? St Petersburg has a sonorous answer, shaped not only by generations of conductors, instrumentalists and teachers, but also by cataclysmic events. That distinctive sound will reach Mumbai as the New Chamber St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra performs at the NCPA on Tuesday. The occasion marks the 120th birth anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose relentless drumbeats in the Leningrad Symphony became a defining symbol of the city’s resistance to the Nazi siege.“Depth of meaning and a fully saturated sonority are what the leading St Petersburg orchestras prefer over passing trends or, at times, excessive visual showmanship,” says the chamber orchestra’s founder-conductor Yaroslav Zaboyarkin. “That is why, for example, the signature sound of the St Petersburg Philharmonic is always recognisable on recordings. Even without a video, you can tell, ‘Yes, that is the St Petersburg Philharmonic playing’.”While the Philharmonic’s roots date back to 1802, the New Chamber orchestra was founded in 2020 with the support of the late conductor Yuri Temirkanov, credited with preserving the distinctive sound of the Philharmonic through the turbulent years surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. With a focus on nurturing young musicians, the New Chamber orchestra’s members include artists from the Philharmonic as well as students and postgraduates of the St Petersburg Conservatory. Both institutions, world-renowned centres of Western classical music, bore Leningrad-era names during the Soviet period, before the city reverted to its historic name in 1991.“We are musicians brought up in Shostakovich’s hometown. The music of Shostakovich flows in our veins. For us, this creative connection is very important,” says Zaboyarkin of his ensemble.The tradition forms part of the broader Russian school, one of the dominant traditions in Western classical performance, associated with figures such as Rachmaninoff, Horowitz, Richter, Gilels, Heifetz, Milstein and Oistrakh.Shostakovich’s most important symphonies are frequently performed by Mumbai’s own Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), which is based at the NCPA and last month marked its 20th anniversary with a series of concerts. Another India connection with Shostakovich is that Ravi Shankar, during his first tour of the Soviet Union as part of an official cultural delegation in the mid-1950s, had met him.Tuesday’s programme includes the composer’s Romance from ‘The Gadfly’, Two Pieces for String Octet, and Five Pieces for Two Violins & Piano (arranged for string orchestra), as well as Tchaikovsky’s celebrated Serenade for Strings.“For me,” says Zaboyarkin, “the ultimate goal of any cultural exchange is, above all, spiritual mutual enrichment and deepening the level of understanding between people. Music is a universal language that requires neither translation nor additional explanation.”
