Scriabin. Stravinsky. Shostakovich

In 1896 the twenty-five-year-old Alexander Scriabin returned from a tour abroad that had been organised by the publisher and philanthropist Mitrofan Petrovich Belyaev, and literally in a single breath he composed his one and only Piano Concerto. His arsenal as a composer already included a great deal of salon piano music, but this was basically the first time that Scriabin worked with an orchestra.
The three parts of the concerto make use of various means of intercommunication between the performers. In the second section, composed in the form of variations, the orchestra accompanies the piano while in the third it acts as a rival to it. In the first section the orchestra instruments appear almost to be a continuation of the piano strings being played. The orchestra gradually merges with the sound of the piano, picks it up and carries it on to powerful culminations.
The music of the first section is adorned with a deep pessimism. Scriabin chose the same tone as Rachmaninoff had in his First Concerto in F Sharp Minor, the tone of Herman’s arioso Forgive Me, Heavenly Creature from Tchaikovsky’s the Queen of Spades. The piano part was written in a maximalist style – there are barely twenty bars where the piano lies silent. In the finale there is no “Polish accent” to be heard – echoes of the masculine and dazzling music of Chopin. in the melancholic episodes Scriabin is inspired by the “Tatiana sequenza” that opens Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.
Anna Bulycheva

Diaghilev’s Ballets russes production of The Firebird on 25 June 1910 at the Opéra de Paris proved a sensational success. Created in close co-operation with the choreographer Michel Fokine and the designer Golovin with outstanding ballet dancers, The Firebird was, in the words of one Parisian critic "a miracle of the enchanting balance between movements, sounds and forms". Soon after the premiere, Stravinsky composed The Firebird orchestral suite (1911), not just because of the success of the music but also due to his wish toperfect the music in the concert hall. In 1919 a new suite emerged in which the composer abandoned the grandiose full orchestra used in the score for the ballet. Twenty-five years later, in 1945, Stravinsky once again edited his orchestration of the suite. In the 1919 version the suite includes the episodes Introduction, Dance of the Firebird, Round Dances of the Tsarevnas, Kashchei’s Infernal Dance, the Cradle Song and Finale.
Iosif Raiskin

Violin Concerto No 1 in A Minor, Op. 99, 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