Name: Explorations of Humanity
Start: 2024-02-02T19:30:00
Location: Alice Pratt Brown Hall

Lidiya Yankovskaya

Maximus Gurath

The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University

Fast-rising star conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya leads a program exploring different shades of the human experience, beginning with Jessie Montgomery’s Hymn for Everyone, a meditation on life during the pandemic. 2023 Shepherd School of Music Concerto Competition Winner Maximus Gurath shines in Elgar’s profoundly expressive Cello Concerto, a poignant response to World War I. For Shostakovich, his Fifth Symphony was literally a matter of life and death—already on thin ice with a Soviet regime that regularly “purged” unsuitable artists, a negative review would have been disastrous, and likely fatal. The monumental masterpiece he created achieved the impossible: appeasing authorities, scattering covert moments of defiance, and immortalizing music’s power to speak volumes without a single word.