No. 2074 Subscription (Program A)

Born in Sontsivka village (today in Ukraine) in Imperial Russia, Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) was trained by Anatoly Lyadov (1855–1914) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. The young composer-pianist 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 Bolshevik Revolution, Prokofiev left his home in May 1918 by permission of the Soviet authorities. For the next eighteen years, he traveled back and forth between America and Europe in pursuit of greater renown. His Violin Concerto No. 1, penned in 1916–1917, is one of his masterpieces born of his brilliant inspiration just before this emigration, alongside works including the opera The Gambler (1915–1917), Symphony No. 1 Classical (1916–1917), and Visions fugitives (1915–1917) for piano.
Prokofiev wrote the Violin Concerto No. 1 with the premiere in his mind by the Polish violinist Paul Kochanski, then based in Russia. However, this didn’t happen due to the revolutionary turmoil. It finally received the world-premiere in 1923 in Paris under Serge Koussevitzky (who had just fled the USSR) conducting his own orchestra and its concert master Marcel Darrieux as soloist. To Parisian audiences seeking out the cutting edge, this concerto evidently sounded outdated and overly Romantic. The legendary violinist Joseph Szigeti was one of the first to make its true worth known to the world, delivering its brilliant rendition in Prague and Leningrad in 1924, before becoming the first in the world to record it in 1935.
This concerto takes an unusual tempo layout with three slow-fast-slow movements. The first movement, often likened to a daydream, has the violin solo introduce the drifting first theme marked “sognando (dreamily)” at the start, and the bouncy second theme played “narrante (like a story-telling) .” In contrast, the middle scherzo movement offers a demoniac motoric burst of notes typical of Prokofiev. The finale takes us back into the lyrical world of daydreams, and concludes amidst an ethereal atmosphere recalling the end of the first movement.

[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. During the turbulence following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, he studied composition with Maximilian Steinberg (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s pupil and son-in-law) at the Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) Conservatory. Starting with the successful 1926 premiere of the Symphony No. 1, Shostakovich went on to establish himself as the most important symphonist to follow Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Jean Sibelius (1865–1957).
Having experienced the Revolution at age 11, Shostakovich remained behind the Iron Curtain, unlike Sergei Rakhmaninov (1873–1943) who exiled himself, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) who decided to stay in the West, nor above-mentioned Prokofiev who lived outside the USSR for almost two decades. On their native soil, especially during the era of Joseph Stalin from 1924 to 1953, the authorities utilized every art form as a vehicle for their propaganda. Many of artists who didn’t meet the official Soviet style called “socialist realism” were destined for purge, labor camp, torture or execution.
As for Shostakovich, the regime condemned his opera in 1936 so he rehabilitated himself writing the “exemplary” Symphony No. 5 (1937). Four years later, his Symphony No. 7 Leningrad, penned in the midst of the Great Patriotic War (Eastern Front), received worldwide recognition as a masterpiece prefiguring the triumph against the Nazism. He then set to work on the Symphony No. 8 in the summer of 1943 immediately after the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad. However, contrary to the Party’s expectation, it didn’t turn out to be another patriotically exultant symphony with a triumphal finish. Enraged, the Party would later ban it from performance.
Like Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth (Destiny), Shostakovich’s Eighth begins in C minor and ends in C major, provided their conclusions are miles apart. The latter is cast unconventionally in five movements of which the last three are played without pause. Moreover, the anguished first movement in modified sonata form takes up approximately half of the whole symphony. At the beginning, low strings declare a dreadful three-note motif (C–B-flat–C) which would play, in slightly different shapes, important roles in all other movements. After the next sarcastic scherzo movement, the machinelike third movement is shackled by a remorseless ostinato (persistently repeated phrase). The slow fourth movement in G-sharp minor, a passacaglia (continuous variation on a bass theme), is also haunted by a relentless repeat: tam-tam (gong) leads to the forceful statement of the theme followed by its eleven variations. The work attains C major at the opening of the finale in rondo sonata form, where the inverted three-note motif (C–D–C) is the base of the idyllic main theme given by bassoon. The momentary optimism makes way for likely the most dispirited C-major close in symphonic history.

[Kumiko Nishi]