Figuring conspicuously among the works by the 20th-century Russian classical composer Dmitri Shostakovich are chamber genres – string quartettes, the “24 Preludes and Fugues”piano cycle, numerous songs, romances and other compositions.

His song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry (1948) was inspired by a book of poems he bought at a newspaper stand. Written during the composer’s hard times, these chamber pieces are emotionally intense: most of the songs in the cycle deal with everyday life before the 1917 revolution, while the final parts reflect life in the Soviet period.

The composer was convinced that laughter in music was just as important and necessary as “lyrics, tragedy and pathos”. He always liked satire and grotesque. This concert also highlights this important part of the composer’s genius.

Satires (1960) is a song cycle based on poems by Sasha Chyorny (Alexander Mikhailovich Glickberg, 1880–1932), a famous poet of the Silver Age. His poems were first published in 1960, and Shostakovich came across that book. Sasha Chyorny’s ironical poems touched the composer’s feelings, and he composed this cycle in just a few days. In Satires Shostakovich mocks not only popular genres such as waltz, galop, march, but also classical hits: Rachmaninoff’s Spring Torrents romance, Lenky’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata.

Antiformalist Rayok (1948–1968) is a ruthless satire on the political regime, the composer’s response to the resolution of the Communist Party Central Committee “On Muradeli’s opera /The Great Friendship/” (1948) and the campaign against “formalism” in music. The characters of “Rayok”who speak at the meeting in the Cultural Centre, Edinitsyn, Dvoikin and Troikin, are grotesque parodies of Stalin, Zhdanov and Shepilov. The literary text is most likely to have been written by the author, and it is based on authentic speeches of the party leaders.