R6 / Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 – Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra

“My true subject is suffering,” Dmitri Shostakovich once remarked when speaking about his music. These words resonate with particular urgency in his Eighth String Quartet of 1960, from which the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, later emerged in Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement. The work was written during the composer’s stay in Dresden, a city still marked at the time by the devastation of war.