site.btaSofia Soloists Chamber Orchestra to Perform Symphonies by Shostakovich on April 17

Symphony No. 14 and Chamber Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich will be performed by the Sofia Soloists Chamber Orchestra at Bulgaria Hall in Sofia on April 17, the orchestra said.

Soloists in the concert programme are opera singers Maria Radoeva (soprano), and Bozhidar Bozhkilov (bass). The conductor is Konstantin Dobroykov.

The programme will open with Symphony No. 14, Op. 135 (better known as the Symphony of Death) for strings and percussion, based on poems by Federico García Lorca, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Guillaume Apollinaire and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Chamber Symphony Op. 110a (after String Quartet No. 8) is among Shostakovich's most popular works. It was composed in the summer of 1960 in Dresden, where he was invited to write music for Five Days, Five Nights, a film directed by Lev Arnshtam.