Cello Concerto No. 1 (Shostakovich)

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The Cello Concerto No. 1 in E Flat Major, Opus 107, was written by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1959. He wrote it for Mstislav Rostropovich, who memorised the work in four days and gave the premiere in Leningrad under Yevgeny Mravinsky, on October 9, 1959 in the Large Hall of the Leningrad Conservatory. The first recording was made for the CBS label by Rostropovich accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy in November of the same year.

The concerto lasts around 25 minutes and has four movements including the cadenza:

1. Allegretto
2. Moderato
3. Cadenza — Attacca
4. Allegro con moto

There are similarities between the concerto and the Sinfonia Concertante of Sergei Prokofiev, such as the prominent role of isolated timpani strokes. The composer was quoted in Sovetskaya Kultura (June 6, 1959) as saying that 'an impulse' for the work was provided by his acquaintance with, and admiration of, the earlier work.

[edit] Analysis

The first movement eschews the lyricism typical of the genre: its aggressive four-note main theme is derived from the composer's DSCH motif, although the intervals, rhythm and shape of the motto are continually distorted and re-shaped throughout the movement. It is also related to a theme from the composer's score for the 1948 film The Young Guard, which illustrates a group of Soviet soldiers being marched to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. It is set beside an even more simple theme in the woodwind, which reappears throughout the work:

The opening bars of the first movement in piano and cello reduction, showing the initial themes of the cello and woodwind.

The woodwind theme taking on aspects of the DSCH theme itself just before the introduction of the second subject:

The introduction of the second subject (from bar 85), accompanied by the DSCH version of the initial woodwind motif.

One further theme (at bar 96), originating in folk lullabies, is also found in the lullaby sung by Death to a sick child in Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death.

The second, third and fourth movements are played continuously. The second movement is initially elegiac in tone, with a long melody being passed between the cello and the orchestra. The music become progressively more agitated, building to a climax in bar 148; this is immediately followed by a soothing motif from the solo horn (the only brass instrument in the orchestra) and then an ethereal passage for the cello (playing the first melody in harmonics) and celesta. which leads into the cadenza.

The cadenza, a substantial 148 bars, stands as a movement in itself. It begins by developing the material from the second movement, twice broken by a series of slow, enigmatic pizzicato chords. After the second of these, a continual accelerando passes through allegretto and allegro sections to a piu mosso, which comes to be dominated by the work's opening theme.

The driving finale includes two quotations: the first, at bar 105, is a distorted version of Suliko, a song favoured by Stalin and used by Shostakovich in Rayok, his satire on the Soviet system. The work's opening material then re-emerges to conclude the concerto, incorporating a second quotation from bar 329. This echoes the swirling snow from the Trepak in the Songs and Dances of Death, where it accompanies the seductive song of Death to a drunken peasant freezing in a snowstorm. In a nod to the earlier work by Prokofiev, the concerto's last word is given to the timpani.

[edit] References

• Johnson, Stephen (18 March 2006. Discovering Music: Shostakovich - Cello Concerto No 1 on BBC Radio 3.
• Shostakovich, Dmitri (1959, reprinted 1986). Cello Concertos (volume 17 of collected works). State Publishers 'Music', Moscow.