In the shadow of the Red October. Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich.

2017 will be the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution. The revolution of 1917 has changed the world for good and had an impact on the lives of millions of people. And on the work of three famous Russian composers of the 20th century.
Dmitri Shostakovich, who never managed to escape the control of the Soviet regime; the returnee Sergei Prokofjew, who claimed to have seen through the challenges of the new conditions way too late; and Sergei Rachmaninoff, who took the opportunity of a concert tour to Sweden to escape from Russia, and who never saw his home country again.
The movie “Im Schatten des Roten Oktober. Eine Revolution- Drei Musikerschicksale” tells the stories of three geniuses of Russian music history under the Soviet regime, of the circumstances under which they had to work and live after the Bolshevik revolution and later under Stalin’s rule. It is also a film about what is left of these composers 100 years after the October revolution and 90 years after Stalin’s takeover: The whole range of highly complex compositional works, parallels, differences and intersections of their lives. They are the musical chroniclers of an epoch whose revolutionary ideals ended up in totalitarian oppression.
The films examines how the political overthrow has influenced the lives and works of these three composers, how they took a stand on decades of Soviet dictatorship – between assimilation and (inner and outer) migration.

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