The Piano Trio in C Minor is a youthful work by Dmitry Shostakovich written when he was seventeen years old and studying at the Petrograd Conservatoire. Performed just twice during the composer’s lifetime, in the 1920s, the trio remained unpublished and unknown to the wider public until 1983. It is a work in one movement, notable for the powerful influence of the romantic tradition. Nevertheless, already here Shostakovich was successfully assimilating his composition technique that would become typical in his mature works: the imagistic rethinking and the transformation of the primary musical idea (here this is an initial motif in third with the cello). The Trio in C Minor together with other conservatoire-period works of Shostakovich prepared the soil for the young composer’s first major success – the First Symphony.
Vladimir Khavrov
Violin Concerto No 1 in A Minor, Op. 77, was composed by Shostakovich in circumstances similar to those in which his Fourth Symphony was written. He worked on the symphony at the height of State oppression in 1936, and on the concerto in the most difficult period of 1948, returning from meetings where Zhdanov would teach composers how to write music.
The gloomy and monumental score was completed on 24 March 1948, but because of accusations of “formalism” the premiere only followed seven years later. David Oistrakh, for whom the concerto was written, learned it in secret, and it was only in 1955 that it became possible to perform it in public. The premiere took place on 29 October 1955 in Leningrad. The concerto was performed to terrific acclaim under the baton of Yevgeny Mravinsky. The finale was encored at the insistence of the audience.
The concert is remarkable for its truly symphonic scale. It contains four sections. The Nocturne is followed by a Scherzo, of which the composer was a great admirer and where he used a heart-breaking Jewish theme – the Freylekhs. The unusually expressive cadence of the soloist links the Passacaglia, in which Beethoven’s “motif of fate” is present, with the final Burlesque.
Anna Bulycheva
