Piano Concerto No. 2  -   Rachmaninoff

That the second piano concerto of Rachmaninoff has become one of the most enduringly popular works in the repertoire is a fitting outcome for a work conceived at a time of uplifting personal renewal. Rachmaninoff had been devastated by three events - the death of his mentor Tchaikovsky, dismissive comments about his music made (to his face) by  Leo Tolstoy, and the disastrous premiere of his first symphony – to the extent that he had been rendered almost unable to compose. Luckily, in 1900 he began auto-suggestive therapy with the psychologist and musician Nicolai Dahl, and one year later had recovered sufficiently to compose the present concerto.

Perhaps it is an unconscious reflection of the work’s unusual genesis that it includes two quotations from works that preceded his mental crisis, as if he was reaching back in time to recapture his creative spark. The first of these is found in the main string theme of the first movement, which recalls an earlier liturgical composition; the second, the delicate triplet figure that opens the second movement, was derived from a piano romance.



Symphony  No. 5  -   Shostakovich

By 1937 when Shostakovich composed his fifth symphony, he had already experienced the consequences of living in a state where the opinions of the political elite determined  the success or failure of an artist’s career. Once lauded for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, he now found himself the object of government-inspired vilification for that same work, and wrote the Fifth Symphony as, officially at least, “a soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.”  From these strangest and perhaps least promising of circumstances emerged one of the most admired and frequently performed musical artworks of the C20th.

The work begins with a moderato movement that, following its declamatory canonic opening subsides, builds and subsides once more. This is followed by a biting, satiric scherzo, followed by one of the composer’s trademark soulful adagios. So far, he had written nothing appeasing.  However, in the finale, with a kind of musical slight-of-hand by which the same gesture can be understood in multiple ways, the composer finally gave the authorities what they craved - a “heroic” coda. But it is a coda that can also be heard as ironic, “much ado about nothing.”