No. 2056 Subscription (Program B)

Born into a wealthy Russian landowning family, Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) was a member of The Mighty Handful (The Five). The most active around 1870, this group of young composers aimed to develop a nationalist school of Russian classical music. They derived inspiration from the nation’s folk music, folktales, nature, history and so forth. Mostly self-trained, Mussorgsky’s compositional skills had been underestimated in his lifetime, while his highly individual style and idioms guided future generations to modernism: Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) famously modeled themselves after him with admiration.
Mussorgsky died of alcoholism in poverty, leaving the uncompleted, hardly orchestrated piano vocal score of Khovanshchina (The Khovansky Affair). This historical opera dramatizes the political tumult around Peter the Great (1672–1725)’s accession to the throne following the 1682 Moscow Uprising led by Prince Khovansky. The story features the Old Believers who refused the Russian Orthodox Church reforms and feared Peter’s Westernization. In 1872, the year marking the bicentenary of Peter’s birth, Mussorgsky began to gather material to write the libretto by himself.
Composed in September 1874, Dawn over the Moscow River is the opera’s prelude. Picturesquely depicting a serene river landscape resounding with morning church bells, it contrasts strikingly with the opera proper in great turmoil concluded by the Old Believers’ mass suicide. Shostakovich’s revision and orchestration of the opera for a movie (1959) is notable for being faithful to Mussorgsky’s intentions.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) was born in Saint Petersburg a decade before the Russian Empire collapsed. The son of an amateur singer father (who was an engineer) and a pianist mother, he revealed his astonishing musical talent soon after he started to play piano and compose at an early age. Having lost his father in 1922, the teenage Shostakovich started to earn his bread as a silent-movie pianist in 1924. After gaining an international reputation with the successful 1926 premiere of the Symphony No. 1, his graduation composition at the Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) Conservatory, he entered Warsaw’s International Chopin Piano Competition in 1927 to be selected as one of the finalists.
Shostakovich left us two concertos for his instrument. The unique and modernistic No. 1 (1933) for piano, trumpet and string orchestra, was penned for himself to serve as the piano soloist at the first performance in his home city. Composed in 1957, the present Piano Concerto No. 2 is a product of the post-Stalin era, namely from the Thaw period after the composer had his toughest years facing the Revolution, World War II, Siege of Leningrad, and especially the Kremlin’s life-threatening censorship and ban on his music.
No. 2 is a neo-classical-style concerto in three movements. To our surprise, it is without any political or existential gravity nor somber irony, the composer’s hallmarks. The march-inflected first movement in sonata form astonishes us with its genuine jocular nature, as with the slow middle movement in variation form with probably the most limpidly sweet melodies Shostakovich ever penned. All are attributed to the compositional context: the concerto was a birthday gift to his teenage son Maxim, then a piano student at the Moscow Conservatory, who premiered it as the soloist. Linked to the middle movement without pause, the danceable finale has witty highlights for Maxim, which are some quotes from the French piano pedagogue and composer Charles-Louis Hanon(1819– 1900)’s finger exercises well-known for their effectiveness but also their dryness among piano learners.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Born in Imperial Russia (today in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine) and died in Moscow on the same day as Joseph Stalin, Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) led a roller-coaster life. Trained by Anatoly Liadov (1855– 1914) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, the young Prokofiev attracted the Russian music scene’s attention as a daring “enfant terrible” with his earliest compositions marked by a fierce modernism as represented by the Piano Concerto No. 1 (1912).
Following the 1917 Revolution, he enjoyed freedom both personally and professionally for eighteen years living in the USA and Europe by permission of the Soviet authorities. His life took a new turn in 1936 when he returned for good to the Stalinist USSR offering to him some carrots of fame and opportunities. A few years later, the communist party effectively took his passport away, which prevented him from leaving the country. Against such a background, the censorship forced him to meet the official Soviet style called “Socialist Realism,” otherwise he would be destined for purge, labor camp, torture or execution. Prokofiev was thus obliged to tone his modernist tendencies down to create optimistic works accessible to and inspiring for the Soviet masses, while he succeeded in writing some energetic masterpieces of a great melodic beauty within such constraints.
When Prokofiev wrote the Symphony No. 5 quickly in 1944, he was at the Composers’ House at Ivanovo with Shostakovich and other colleagues. Located about 250 km northeast of Moscow, this public lodging with several cottages enabled composers to avoid cities during the war. As Prokofiev himself admitted, his motive for this composition was a patriotic spirit which was stimulated since Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. Indeed, from the heroic opening to the triumphant ending, Prokofiev makes the best use of the percussion and brass to create an epic military mood accentuating it by dotted rhythms. The utilization of a variety of percussion and a piano, another feature of the orchestration, ensure the vigorous percussive characteristic of the composer.
Penned amid World War II during which the government slightly relaxed the censorship, No. 5 exposes audacious tonal harmonies here and there. The second movement, a scherzo, offers a toccata-style rapid motoric burst of notes typical of Prokofiev, while his genius as an extraordinary melodist has full swing at the dreamy third movement. The theme given by flutes and a bassoon at the beginning of the first sonata movement plays a key role in the coherence of the work: this theme returns with four cellos like a chorale during the slow introduction to the final movement. A joyful rondo, the finale wraps up with a build-up of excitement, reminding us of the symphony’s premiere enthusiastically accepted in January 1945 with the Red Army’s victory over Germany just around the corner.

[Kumiko Nishi]