One week after conducting his National Philharmonic in the concert version of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and presenting six concerts for second-graders in Montgomery County Schools, Maestro Piotr Gajewski returns Saturday to the Music Center at Strathmore with an all-Russian Chamber Orchestra concert honoring Dmitri Shostakovich’s 100th anniversary.

The program pairs the composer’s somber Symphony No. 14 with Peter Tchaikovsky’s lyrical and romantic “Serenade for Strings.” Completed in 1969, the Shostakovich work deviates from the traditional symphony format. Some critics believe it is more like a song cycle because it has 11 songs about mortality written when he was descending into poor health. The songs are divided into four sections, permitting the work to claim kinship to a symphony with four movements.