Aziz Shokhakimov conducts Ravel, Elgar, and Tchaikovsky — With Anastasia Kobekina

Anastasia Kobekina's performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto will be available to stream until May 10, 2026 — don't miss it!

The superb Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra and their music director Aziz Shokhakimov open this stirring program with Le Tombeau de Couperin, Ravel's World War I-era masterpiece that pays tribute to Ravel's friends lost during the war not with a somber dirge, but with lighthearted Baroque elegance and colorful neoclassical harmonies: "The dead are sad enough," Ravel said, "in their eternal silence." Cellist Anastasia Kobekina, capable of such expressive heights that "at times you forget you’re listening to a cello at all, it sounds so lithely human" (Gramophone), then takes the stage to perform one of the pillars of the repertoire, Elgar's heart-wrenching Cello Concerto in E minor.  To close the evening, Shokhakimov and the OPS answer the knock of fate in Tchaikovsky's poignantly autobiographical Fourth Symphony, which breaks with formal conventions to foreground emotional truth.