Oh To Believe in Another World: Shostakovich Symphony No.10

Following a blockbuster season, Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra and Music Director Joanna MacGregor are thrilled to collaborate with one of the world’s greatest living artists, William Kentridge in Brighton Festival 2026.

Using collage, puppets and masked actors in his animated film Oh To Believe in Another World, Kentridge creates a dream-like “abandoned Soviet museum” to accompany Shostakovich’s powerful Symphony No. 10. Kentridge will introduce this astonishing work from the stage, drawing on the politics of oppression in his native South Africa and around the world.

‘How to make a film to accompany a live orchestral performance of a symphony?’ asks Kentridge. ‘There are already 80 musicians; there is the shine of the brass, and the excitement of watching the relationship between the conductor and the musicians. Behind this, to put a film. But the story of Shostakovich and his complicated relationship to the state in the Soviet Union provides the material.

The central characters of the film are Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin; Shostakovich and his student Elmira Nazirova; the poet and playwright Mayakovsky and his lover Lily Brik. We still feel the emotional journey of the music, independent of its historical moorings, but at the same time acknowledge the particular character of the era from which it comes.’