Sunday 12 April

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor Op 18
^1900–01

1. Moderato
2. Adagio sostenuto – Più animato – Tempo I
3. Allegro scherzando

Seong-Jin Cho piano

The Second Piano Concerto was the major work marking Rachmaninoff’s return to composition after the period of silence and self-doubt that followed the failure of his First Symphony in 1897. He wrote the second and third movements quickly in the summer of 1900, but ran into problems with the first movement and rather surprisingly he was persuaded by his cousin, the pianist and conductor Alexander Siloti, to give a public performance of the concerto in its incomplete form – surely a risky venture for a composer so sensitive to criticism. The success of the two completed movements at a Moscow concert in December 1900 did much to re-establish Rachmaninoff’s self-confidence, and the premiere of the completed concerto followed on 27 October 1901.

Each of the concerto’s three movements begins with an idea which leads subtly into the main theme. In the first movement it is the magical wide-spread piano chords, increasing in intensity until they plunge into a great surging string melody. Here, as throughout the concerto, the lasting image is that of piano and orchestra playing together; for despite all the virtuosity demanded of the soloist, the piano is rarely heard alone, and the two elements are blended in an ever-changing symphonic texture.

In the slow movement, after a hushed string introduction, it is the sound of piano and solo wind instruments that sets the mood, the varied textures masking the close relationships between the themes of the first two movements. The introduction to the finale hints at a march, but what emerges after the opening orchestral gestures and a brief piano cadenza is more in the nature of a vigorous dance which alternates with a long, vocal melody closely related to the big tune of the first movement.

The Second Piano Concerto quickly became one of the most popular works in the repertory. The piano writing draws on all the resources of a late-Romantic keyboard style, ranging from dazzling bravura to confessional intimacy. Rachmaninoff always maintained that the difficulties of the Second Concerto were just as great as those of the formidable Third, composed nine years later, but were of a different order: it is not a question of the technique needed to master the notes, but of judging the exact sonority and weight of the notes in different registers to produce the gradations of tone that made the composer’s own performances so outstanding.

_{Note by Andrew Huth Andrew Huth is a musician, writer and translator who writes extensively on French, Russian and Eastern European music.}

_{Image: Ships in a Storm by Ivan Aivazovsky, 1860}

Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No 1 in F minor Op 10
¹⁹²⁵

1. Allegretto – Allegro ma non troppo
2. Allegro
3. Lento
4. Allegro molto – Lento – Allegro molto

When Shostakovich’s First Symphony appeared in 1926, it was welcomed as both a revelation of a new musical voice and as the first outstanding musical work to be composed in Russia since the Revolution – an artistic justification of the Brave New World being created in the USSR. This double view – musical and political – was to be applied to Shostakovich’s music for the rest of his life, often with disastrous personal consequences for the composer, although that was not something that could be foreseen in the early 1920s.

Shostakovich was born in the year after the abortive Revolution of 1905 (which he commemorated in his Eleventh Symphony), and was just 11 years old when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. He grew up during a period of massive social upheaval, civil war and extreme hardship. He was a naturally iconoclastic young man. Music, much of it wild and disorganised, poured out of him with amazing facility. In the First Symphony, though, he was able to write something utterly personal and at the same time win the approval (or at least the grudging respect) of his elders by organising his ideas into a large span which is truly symphonic.

Whatever definition we give the word ‘symphony’, the title still gives rise to expectations of continuity of thought over several movements, a contrast of ideas and moods, themes that can be developed and renewed, and a variety of incidents, all contained within a single, organic process. Plenty of young composers have the ideas, but only a select few have the ability to build them into such a large-scale structure.

The First Symphony was conceived in 1923, when Shostakovich, not yet 17, was already being spoken of as the most outstanding talent in the Petrograd Conservatoire. Two orchestral scherzos, composed in 1919 and 1923, had shown his instinct for orchestral writing, and when in 1924 the Conservatoire set the composition of a symphony as a graduation test piece, Shostakovich was prepared for the challenge. He completed his work in the first two months of 1925, while scraping together some sort of a living bashing away at the piano in Leningrad cinemas, accompanying silent films.

The Symphony was performed by Nikolai Malko and the Leningrad Philharmonic on 12 May 1926. A Berlin performance under Bruno Walter took place in May 1927, and it was soon taken up by Toscanini, Stokowski and Klemperer, among others. The work was always a favourite of the composer himself, and quotations from it appear in both his autobiographical Eighth String Quartet and in his last symphony, the Fifteenth.

Shostakovich’s First Symphony has the least pretentious of openings. Its wry search for a key and a theme reveals the composer’s lifelong tendency towards sparse, concentrated use of instruments, treating the orchestra as an ensemble of soloists. This is music in which every note counts, every sound stands out clearly and meaningfully.

References to march and waltz styles, tinged with irony, show the young composer’s absorption of common, popular material to his own expressive ends. The scherzo second movement, which was immediately encored at the Symphony’s premiere, adds a piano (Shostakovich’s own instrument) to the orchestra, playing a quirky individual role in the spiky humour of the movement.

In the Largo there is a breadth of thought, a superb control of phrasing and tempo which creates a sense of both space and depth. This is the movement that most clearly foreshadows some of the epic statements of Shostakovich’s later work, when his view of the world, and consequently his musical language, had become far more complex.

The finale balances the high spirits of the first two movements with the depth of the third in a virtuoso combination of contrasts. Here is a voice that would change in emphasis and style over the next half-century, but would always be recognisable. As one would expect from a youthful first symphony it is inventive and exuberant, but the music is often coloured with anxiety and at times even a sense of nervous panic.

_{Note by Andrew Huth}

_{Image: Demonstration on October 17, 1905 by Ilya Repin, 1907}