The snarling solo violin (often called the Devil’s instrument) is surrounded by ghoulish, shrieking woodwinds. ![]() It is a grotesque dance, infused with jagged rhythms. The second movement is a demonic Scherzo. This ghostly nocturnal landscape is filled with lament and persistent anxiety. For Oistrakh, it represented “a suppression of feelings.” Instead, we are plunged into the quiet terror of the night. This is not the magical, shimmering night music of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The first movement is titled, Nocturne: Moderato. Set in four movements, the Concerto was once described by Shostakovich as “a symphony for solo violin and orchestra.” Its unusual instrumentation includes a full wind section, four horns, tuba, tambourine, tam-tam, xylophone, celesta, and two harps, but no trumpets or trombones. It was amid this terrifying environment that Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto was born. In 1997, Richard Taruskin wrote, “No one alive today can imagine the sort of extreme mortal duress to which artists in the Soviet Union were subjected, and Shostakovich more than any other.” For Shostakovich, a knock on the door from the KGB (secret police) in the middle of the night was a real possibility. For a time, the composer slept in the stairway of his apartment building to spare his wife and children the trauma of seeing him taken away. The Octopremiere, featuring Oistrakh with the Leningrad Philharmonic, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, was an “extraordinary success.” In anticipation of an eventual performance, Shostakovich worked in collaboration with the Concerto’s dedicatee, the violinist David Oistrakh, on revisions to the score. Under the directive, all art had to serve a larger social purpose. The work’s completion in 1948 coincided with the “anti formalism” campaign of the Zhdanov Doctrine in relation to music. 1 in A minor was a piece destined for the desk drawer. Much of this music ended up hidden in the composer’s “desk drawer.” Then, there is the music that Shostakovich dared not release publicly until after Stalin’s death in 1953. There are the faceless proletarian marches, patriotic hymns, propagandistic film scores, and other superficial works which were written to appease Stalin and his cultural censors. ![]() The music of Dmitri Shostakovich falls into two categories.
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