Cello Concerto No.1, Op.107

Cadenza -

Allegro con moto

At a fairly early stage in his career, when he was just beginning to be known outside what was then the Soviet Union, Mstislav Rostropovich badly wanted Shostakovich to write a concerto for him. “What should I do to make Dmitri Dmtriyevich write me a cello concerto?” he asked the composer’s wife. “Slava,” she replied,”if you want Dmitri Dmtriyevich to write something for you, the only recipe I can give you is this - never ask or talk to him about it.” Rostropovich took her advice and some years later his patience was rewarded with the first of the two concertos Shostakovich was to dedicate to him.

“When I learned that Shostakovich had finished it,” the cellist recalled, “I immediately went up to Leningrad… I received the score on the evening of 2 August 1959 and I learnt the work in four days exactly. I practised for ten hours the first day and had the score memorized within three days. It was the most wonderful pleasure for me.” The first performance, with Rostropovich and the Leningrad Philharmonic conducted by Eugeny Mravinsky, was a great success and the work is now one of the most frequently performed of its kind.

“I took a simple little theme and tried to develop it.” Shostakovich’s assessment of the creative process that produced the First Cello Concerto is unduly modest but it does make a fundamental point about the work. While there are several other themes, some of them very much more melodious, none is more important than the jagged little tune introduced by the solo cello in the opening bars. You can’t miss it: those four notes are heard more than a dozen times in the first minute alone. The main theme of a brisk and obsessive march, it eventually gives way, on the loud insistence of timpani and woodwind, to a another tune, this one proclaimed by the cello in its upper register and at the top of its voice. It is later taken up by a clarinet, just before the first entry of the horn which, as the one brass instrument in the whole ensemble, also has a solo role to play. The horn is intent on restoring the four-note main theme to the centre of attention and is largely successful in keeping it there until, towards the end of the movement, it takes on the responsibility of reintroducing the second main theme.

The comparatively slow (Moderato) second movement is a very much more poetic inspiration abundant in lyrical melody. The first two themes – one quietly presented by violins, the other by the solo cello in response to an appealing horn call – give rise to much thought but not much overt passion. The other main theme, the entry of which is reserved until after a quiet recall of the violin material, has the opposite effect. Introduced by the cello over gently bouncing woodwind chords, almost as if in a Tchaikovsky ballet, it provokes an eloquent and eventful climax. Passion has still not subsided when the violins re-impose their opening theme but the following horn call now evokes a different response from the cello, which resorts to whispered high harmonics to recall its first theme in a delicately coloured dialogue with the celesta.

The Moderato leads directly and imperceptibly into the third movement, an extended cadenza scored for cello alone. Immensely challenging though it is, this is not the virtuoso episode of the conventional concerto but a philosophical meditation on foregoing themes – mainly those of the Moderato but also including, as the tempo hots up, the jagged four-note tune from the first movement.

Shostakovich’s purpose in reminding us of his “simple little theme” becomes clear in the last movement, which also follows without a break. This Allegro con moto begins as a robustly tuneful, fiercely articulated satire, picking in particular on the composer’s old (and by then safely dead) adversary, Joseph Stalin, whose favourite tune, a Georgian folk song called “Suliko,” comes in for some cutting comments. However, on a clear signal from the timpani and a four-note screech on the woodwind, the movement changes direction. From this point on, it is a manic celebration of the jagged little tune which opened the work and which now presents itself in a variety of guises – most prominently on the solo horn but in all parts of the orchestra as the cello makes the pace and drives it relentless into the closing bars.

Gerald Larner ©2006