British conductor Alpesh Chauhan, musical director of the Birmingham Opera Company, performs for the first time at Casa da Música. He brings us Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8, one of the Russian composer’s most controversial symphonic works. Written in the summer of 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, its sombre and desperate tone was poorly received in the Soviet Union, given the recent successes of the Red Army. Shostakovich defended himself by saying that the Eighth was “an optimistic work and a hymn to life”, based on the concept that “everything that is dark and gloomy tends to disappear and beauty ultimately triumphs”. On the 120th anniversary of the composer’s birth, this is an opportunity to hear one of his most sublime and mysterious works, rarely performed in concert.