Portland Chamber Orchestra: "Strings Attached" with music by Dmitry Shostakovich

Dmitry Shostakovich belongs to the generation of composers trained principally after the Communist Revolution of 1917. He was graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory as a pianist and composer, his First Symphony winning immediate favor. His subsequent career in Russia varied with the political climate.

The initial success of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk was followed by official condemnation, emanating apparently from Stalin himself. His Fifth Symphony, in 1937, brought partial rehabilitation, while the war years offered a propaganda coup in the Leningrad Symphony performed in the city under German siege.

In 1948 Shostakovich fell foul of the official musical establishment with a Ninth Symphony thought to be frivolous, but enjoyed the relative freedom following the death of Stalin in 1953. Outwardly and inevitably conforming to official policy, posthumous information suggests that Shostakovich remained very critical of Stalinist dictates, particularly with regard to music and the arts.

He occupies a significant position in the 20th century as a symphonist and as a composer of chamber music, writing in a style that is sometimes spare in texture but always accessible, couched as it is in an extension of traditional tonal musical language.

Soon after the completion of the brilliant opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, Shostakovich concluded the last of his 24 Preludes for Piano, op.34 on March 2, 1933. Only three days later, he began composing the Concerto in C minor, op. 35, his very first concerto. It was completed four months later. "I composed it more in a popular vein, … cannot very well call it one of my best works," said Shostakovich in an interview in 1959. He went on to say that he was "not exactly displeased with this work." What a composer says about his work is one thing, the result of his efforts heard in concert quite another. The latter speaks Shostakovich's language frankly, without pretense and, above all, with the usual sideways glance at potential ideological censure.

The carefree style of his youth with its wonderfully impertinent, ironic phrases, his unreserved sallies into all manner of stylistic directions, his bold and frequent use of popular music's bountiful resources came to be cast in melancholy tones and tragic hues with the passing of the years. Can his quote of the Rondo a capriccio, op.129 by Beethoven in the closing movement of his First Piano Concerto be a throwback to a more unconcerned creative period?

The four-movement form harks back to a pre-classic model. The writing for the two solo instruments at the outset - the piano with its plummeting scale-wise run which returns with equal speed, the trumpet with an energetic eighth note - plunk down their calling cards much in keeping with pre-classic concertos. From then on it is a veritable firework of inspiration. There is no sign of classic first and second themes.

Shostakovich makes use of brilliant ideas, burlesques parlor music and quotes from everyday musical language. Once and again the trumpet jokingly introduces the sounds of bugle calls or jazz inflected phrases, only to be followed by an uproarious gallop and dynamic revolutionary intonations. These are interrupted by toccata inspired passages. The constant shifts between such disparate elements lend the movement its form as does its span of expression. The melodic tenderness of the Lento which follows suggests music from another world. But here, too, are toccata-like passages which transform the piano into a true percussion instrument. A brief Moderato serves as a transition to an ebullient finale. Closing the large form is the renewed juggling of highly varied style elements as heard in the concerto's opening movement further augmented by quotes from works of Beethoven and Haydn.