In February, Dimitri Kitaenko is scheduled to conduct two programs with the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra in the opera-house of Doha.
On 11 February they play the Symphony No 7 (Leningrad) by Dmitri
Shostakovich, which the composer fiercely composed in 1941in a few weeks’ time only, during the siege of Leningrad by the German army. As he said, he did not even stop when he normally would have to go in a shelter because of bomb alert. He dedicated the work to the heroic battle against fascism.
On the 17 February, Dimitri Kitaenko will conduct the Qatar Philharmonic in Piotr Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto (which is, actually, the second one, since it was composed after the one which today carries the No 2). The German-Korean pianist Christopher Park, prize-winner of the Leonard Bernstein Award is the soloist. The magazine Pizzicato praised him as one extremely mature and sovereign pianist with an intense, expressive playing, free of extravagances. The newspaper Die Welt described him as “extremely sensitive” and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported a “compelling culture of touch”.