Concertino Op.94 (1954)

Adagio – Allegretto – Adagio – Allegretto – Adagio – Allegro

Like the Second Piano Concerto he was to write three years later, the Concertino was designed by the composer to help his son Maxim, then in his mid-teens, further his career as a pianist. Maxim’s performance of the Concerto did succeed in getting him into the Moscow Conservatoire where, however, he dropped his ambitions as a soloist and took up conducting instead. Neither work represents Dmitri Shostakovich at his most serious or, indeed, at his best but they are both highly entertaining, the Concertino resembling the contemporaneous Festive Overture in its frankly populist attitude. The portentous opening bars of the Concertino sound almost like a parody of the slow introduction to the recently completed Tenth Symphony: the second piano opens the work with rumbling tremolandos low in the left hand before uttering a strident statement in dotted rhythms and double octaves. The first piano’s reply is a quiet chorale which soothes the savage breast of its partner.

The first theme of the Allegretto is quietly introduced by first piano over a rhythmic accompaniment on the first. It is not to stay quiet for very long, however, as the dynamics rise    in glittering figurations recalling one of Shostakovich’s frenzied orchestral scherzos. The second main theme is tossed recklessly backwards and forwards between the two instruments until the first return of the portentous dotted rhythms and the Adagio chorale. The second return of the introductory material follows rumbustious development and recapitulation episodes and leads into a short and essentially snappy coda.