Czech Philharmonic ⬩ Mao Fujita

“I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began. The war brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven’t forgotten the terrible pre-war years. That is what my symphonies are about, including Number Eight.”
– Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

It is no wonder that Shostakovich preferred to discuss his Eighth Symphony publicly only as an attempt to depict the tragedy of the Second World War, which took the lives of millions of Russians. The work’s gloomy mood was ill suited for the Soviet regime’s propaganda. The symphony was withdrawn from the repertoire, and it was officially banned in 1948. It did not return to concert halls until eight years later.

Richard Strauss’s Burleske for piano and orchestra did not have an easy time reaching listeners either. The young composer wrote the work originally titled Scherzo in D minor in 1886 for the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who had secured the still youthful Strauss a conducting post with the Meiningen Court Orchestra.

Bülow, however, called the work unplayable and refused to learn it. Ultimately, the composer himself played the solo part in Meiningen. The work waited three years for its next performance, when the pianist Eugen d’Albert persuaded Strauss to simplify the piece, earning the dedication of the revised version of the Scherzo, now with its new title Burleske.

This is not the first encounter between the Japanese pianist Mao Fujita and the Czech Philharmonic. In 2023, he took part in a tour of Asia with the orchestra and Semyon Bychkov. He again played Dvořák’s Piano Concerto under Jakub Hrůša’s baton at the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall in August 2024. A month later, he gave a recital at Prague’s Rudolfinum.