Cello Concerto No. 1 in E flat major

The Cello Concerto No. 1 in E Flat Major, Opus 107, was composed in 1959 by Dmitri Shostakovich. He wrote the work for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich, who committed it to memory in four days and gave the premiere on October 4, 1959, with Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in the Large Hall of the Leningrad Conservatory. The first recording was made in November of that year by Rostropovich and the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the baton of Eugene Ormandy.

Scoring and structure

The concerto is scored for two flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets (each doubling B-flat and A), two bassoons (2nd doubling contrabassoon), one horn, timpani, celesta, and strings.

The work has four movements in two sections, with movements two through four played without a pause:

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

A typical performance runs approximately 28 minutes in length.

Analysis

The first concerto is widely considered to be one the most difficult concerted works for cello, along with the Sinfonia Concertante of Sergei Prokofiev, with which it shares certain features (such as the prominent role of isolated timpani strokes). Shostakovich said that "an impulse" for the piece was provided by his admiration for that earlier work.^[1]

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 simpler 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 artificial harmoics) 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 third 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.

References

1. ^ Shostakovich was quoted in Sovetskaya Kultura, June 6, 1959

• 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.

External links

• Dmitry Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, program notes by Barbara Heninger for the Redwood Symphony.