PROGRAM NOTES
by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Cello Concerto No. 1, Op. 107
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Composed in 1959. Premiered on October 4, 1959 in Leningrad, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky with Mstislav Rostropovich as soloist.

By the mid-1950s, Dmitri Shostakovich had developed a musical language of enormous subtlety, sophistication and range, able to encompass such pieces of “Socialist Realism” as the Second Piano Concerto, the Festive Overture, and the Symphonies No. 11 (“The Year 1905”) and No. 12 (“Lenin”), as well as the profound outpourings of the First Violin Concerto, the Tenth Symphony and the late string quartets. The First Cello Concerto, written for Mstislav Rostropovich during the summer of 1959, straddles both of Shostakovich’s expressive worlds, a quality exemplified by two anecdotes told by the great cellist himself:

“Shostakovich gave me the manuscript of the First Cello Concerto on August 2, 1959. On August 6th I played it for him from memory, three times. After the first time he was so excited, and of course we drank a little bit of vodka. The second time I played it not so perfect, and afterwards we drank even more vodka. The third time I think I played the Saint-Saëns Concerto, but he still accompanied his Concerto. We were enormously happy....”

“Shostakovich suffered for his whole country, for his persecuted colleagues, for the thousands of people who were hungry. After I played the Cello Concerto for him at his dacha in Leningrad, he accompanied me to the railway station to catch the overnight train to Moscow. In the big waiting room we found many people sleeping on the floor. I saw his face, and the great suffering in it brought tears to my eyes. I cried, not from seeing the poor people but from what I saw in the face of Shostakovich....”

The ability of Shostakovich’s music, like the man himself, to display the widest possible range of moods in succession or even simultaneously is one of his most masterful achievements. (The same may be said of Mahler, whose music was an enormous influence on Shostakovich.) The opening movement of the First Cello Concerto may be heard as almost Classical in the clarity of its form and the conservatism of its harmony and themes, yet there is a sinister undercurrent coursing through this music, a bleakness of spirit not entirely masked by the ceaseless activity. The following Moderato grows from sad melodies of folkish character, piquantly harmonized, which are gathered into a huge welling up of emotion before subsiding to close the movement. The extended solo cadenza that follows without pause is an entire movement in itself. (Shostakovich had used a similar formal technique in the Violin Concerto No. 1 of 1948.) Thematically, it springs from the preceding slow movement, and reaches an almost Bachian depth of feeling. The cadenza leads directly to the finale, one of Shostakovich’s most witty and sardonic musical essays. With disarming ease, the main theme of the first movement is recalled in the closing section of the finale to round out the Concerto’s form. “It is difficult to think of any modern concerto,” wrote Alan Frank, “which pursues its objectives in so purposeful a manner with little or no exploration of by-ways.”

In addition to its purely musical value, Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto deserves a significant footnote in Russia’s modern artistic history. The piece was written for Rostropovich, about whom the composer said in his purported memoirs, Testimony, “In general, Rostropovich is a real Russian; he knows everything and he can do everything. Anything at all. I’m not even talking about music here, I mean that Rostropovich can do almost any manual or physical work, and he understands technology.” Shostakovich and Rostropovich were close friends during the composer’s later years, and they lived as neighbors for some time in the Composers’ House in Moscow. Rostropovich gave the Concerto both its world premiere (Leningrad; October 4, 1959) and its first American performance (Philadelphia; November 6, 1959), and was the inspiration for Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2 of 1966. In 1974, Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, defected to live and work in the West; four years later they were deprived of their Russian citizenship and became “non-persons” in their native land. In 1979 Dmitri and Ludmilla Sollertinsky published their Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, which was essentially the Soviet rebuttal to the scathing criticism leveled in Testimony, issued several months earlier. Though Rostropovich was one of Shostakovich’s best friends and most important artistic motivators, his name is not even mentioned in the Sollertinskys’ Pages, and the fine First Cello Concerto is dismissed in the book with a mere, passing half-sentence.

MORE NOTES ON THIS PROGRAM

HAYDN - Symphony No. 88 in G major
MENDELSSOHN - Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90, "Italian"

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