We have already had the pleasure of welcoming the "grande dame" of the piano, Elisabeth Leonskaja, to Gendarmenmarkt a few times. As part of our Shostakovich homage, she is now a guest with a Russian programme. It begins with Sergei Prokofiev's five "sarcasms" from 1912/14, which draw grotesque, torn characters with avant-garde means of the time. The focus of the recital is Dmitri Shostakovich's demanding, austere Second Piano Sonata. He wrote it in 1943 as a dedication to his teacher and close friend Leonid Nikolayev, who had died of typhus after being evacuated from besieged Leningrad in the Crimea. Finally, Tchaikovsky's Piano Sonata op. 37 from 1878 leads back to a supposedly brighter, at least musically more harmonious, era.