In Verbier, Russia and Ukraine together

It was in a torrent of applause that the inaugural concert ended on Friday evening, in the Salle des Combins. Conductor Gianandrea Noseda will have wet his shirt – literally and figuratively – to conduct the Fourth Symphony by Shostakovich, one of the Russian composer’s most powerful and experimental works. This fresco was written in the mid-1930s in a climate of political repression in the USSR, before being premiered only in 1961. Sixty years later, the young musicians of the Verbier Festival Orchestra seemed galvanized under the baton of a demiurge .