Funzing Talks is a new concept which aims to re-invent your after work drinks. They've pulled together an impressive array of leading entrepreneurs, intellectuals, bright thinkers and incredible individuals to inspire your evenings. Held in a hand picked range of bars across Manchester, and now London, a Funzing Talks event makes the perfect after work activity.

Funzing has always encouraged you to do something different with your free time, so we say do just that - you never know where it may lead you!

BBC music broadcaster and composer Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and explains how it gave form to the fears and hopes of an oppressed nation. Johnson writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness and

tells of how the music of Shostakovich gave him unexpected strength after struggling with bipolar disorder since adolescence.

Through interviews conducted with surviving members of the Soviet orchestras, through his reading of philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neurologists, Johnson paints a compelling picture of one man’s

music and its power to validate and sustain another man’s life.

‘What I’m talking about is not simply my personal ‘journey’: rather, it’s a testimony to the sustaining, uplifting, ultimately restorative power of Shostakovich’s music.’ Yet there is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it – not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a far safer kind of society?

Doors: 7pm / Talk starts: 7.30pm

Tickets available here

**This talk includes a small wine, beer or soft drink