Michael Sanderling conducts Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15

In memory of the bombing of Dresden by the British and American Air Forces, when tens of thousands were killed over three days from February 13-15, 1945, the Dresden Philharmonic performs Shostakovich's 15th and final symphony. From Dresden's brand-new concert hall in the heart of the rebuilt Kulturpalast, the great German cellist and conductor Michael Sanderling leads the orchestra with a masterful hand.

Shostakovich is a prominent counterexample to the fabled "curse of the ninth," after Beethoven, Schubert, Dvořák, Bruckner, and Mahler died before completing a tenth. Beginning in 1925, the Russian made fifteen contributions to the genre, ending with the 15th in 1971, written while Shostakovich was ill: "I wrote it in the hospital," he said in an interview with Royal Brown, "and even later back in the dacha, it would not leave me in peace. It's a work that simply took hold of me, one of the few to appear clearly in my mind from the beginning, from the first note to the last."