Political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, the uncertainty of images is much closer to how the world is. That’s something we’ve very much learnt the hard way through the 20th century; there are so many failures of grand ideas. — William Kentridge
On December 5–7, 2024, the New York Philharmonic performs Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93 by Dmitri Shostakovich, accompanied by the animated film Oh To Believe in Another World by South African visual artist and filmmaker William Kentridge; Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts.
The five-channel work Oh To Believe in Another World originates from a single projection film commissioned by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. These performances mark the first time the film has been presented with live orchestra in the United States.
Oh To Believe in Another World traverses four decades in the history of the Soviet Union: from the aftermath of the 1917 revolution to the death of Lenin in 1924, the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, and through to the death of Stalin in 1953. Grounded in Shostakovich’s complex relationship with the Soviet Union, the film examines the cultural history of the period with a cast of characters including intellectuals, poets, and artists. The film’s protagonists include Soviet intellectuals, politicians, and figures of the avant-garde, such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mayakovsky, Lilya Brik, and Shostakovich himself, as well as his student Elmira Nazirova: “participants in the politics and culture of their time who embody the simultaneous hope in revolutionary ideals and the disillusionment of their failure in the lived world.” Here they populate a model of an imagined Soviet museum which becomes a makeshift dream world inhabited by historical film footage, ballerina puppets, lines from Mayakovsky’s poetry and plays, and slogans from the Russian Revolution.
In Kentridge’s words, “The form is one of collage, and the larger proposition is that one needs to understand history as a form of collage.”
The New York Philharmonic gave the US Premiere of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony in October 1954, conducted by then Music Director Dimitri Mitropoulos, and has since performed the work more than 30 times. The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death, on August 9, 1975.
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