Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin II

Musical protest against injustice and violence is the theme of the programme presented by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin in the Konzerthaus Berlin on 11 September 2025.


The orchestra’s chief conductor Vladimir Jurowski has utilised this particular date – 80 years after the end of World War II and 24 years after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York – to channel a profound musical exploration of the darker chapters of history and their repercussions on our present day and age.


For centuries, chorales and hymns have aroused and shaken up the world from its torpor. Three orchestral works from the 20th century all focused on this theme follow on from the Napoleon Ode in the concert given by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin.

Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony is an almost 75-minute-long protest against despotism and injustice. The background to the composition is provided by the events of 1905 when the Russian Czar ordered troops to shoot at the hungry and unarmed crowds of people gathered in front of the Winter Palace while singing hymns and chorales. Shostakovich’s symphony stands as a sublime memorial to these victims.

37 years later, the German Nazis murdered the original population of the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky as retribution for the assassination of the SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague”. The Nazis razed the entire area to the ground the very same day.


In Bohuslav Martinů’s composition in memory of the over 2.000 victims, the composer quotes the St Wenceslas chorale dating back to the 12th century, the ancient hymn of resistance for all Czechs. Josef Suk utilised the same chorale in 1914 to express the hope for an autonomous Czech state after the end of World War I.


Bohuslav Martinů (1890 – 1959)
Memorial to Lidice (1943)


Josef Suk (1874 – 1935)
Meditation on the Old Czech chorale "St. Wenceslas", op. 35a (1914)
for string orchestra


Arnold Schönberg (1874 – 1951)
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte op. 41 (1942/43)
version for string orchestra, piano and speaker


Dmitri Schostakowitsch (1906 – 1975)
Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103 (1956/57)