In the 1850s German audiences knew the young pianist Johannes Brahms whose repertoire included piano concerti by Mozart and Beethoven. In the early 1880s all major towns in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had the opportunity to hear the composer perform his First Piano Concerto in D Minor.
But the work was not an immediate success: the premiere in Hanover on 22 January 1859 and the concert soon afterwards in Leipzig brought Brahms little pleasure. It is known that the “extremely piercing dissonances” and “unpleasant sounds”, as Edward Bernsdorf of Signale für die musikalische Welt wrote, were dismissed by the critics. In Leipzig it was performed to no applause whatsoever. The company Breitkopf und Härtel even refused to work with the young and apparently unpromising composer.
But the fact is that the first audiences had expected typical concert music – virtuoso and undemanding in nature. Instead of this they were presented with a work of symphonic scale which has “exchanges” with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In the first section of the concerto there are stormy and inhuman passions, but the stunned music lovers were unable even to enjoy the Adagio – a brilliant example of Brahms’ lyricism (the composer himself said that the second section of the concerto was a portrait of his muse, Clara Schumann).
Violin Concerto No 1 in A Minor was written during one of the hardest and most desperate periods in the life of Dmitry Shostakovich. The composer started work on the piece in July 1947 and continued in 1948 when he began to be persecuted for the second time in his life. It was only on 29 October 1955 that the concerto was performed for the first time in Leningrad under the baton of Yevgeny Mravinsky. The solo was performed by David Oistrakh, for whom the concerto was written and to whom it is dedicated.
In terms of the seriousness of its tone, expression and concentration, the First Violin Concerto can easily be compared with any of Shostakovich’s symphonies. Unlike the symphonies, however, throughout all four parts (Nocturne, Scherzo, Passacaglia and Finale) there is just one and the same hero who is embodied by the solo violin. This does not, however, imbue the work any subjective or lyrical character at all. Shostakovich gave the violin a very masculine character, and one of the main ides of the concerto was, apparently, overcoming difficulties. It was not by chance that in the Passacaglia Shostakovich turned to the intonations of Bach’s music, which for him symbolised the loftiest spiritual values.
Anna Bulycheva
|
