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Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major
Composed: 1959
Premiered: 1959, Saint Petersburg
Duration: 30 minutes

The music of Shostakovich cannot really be understood in isolation from its social context, but the composer’s relationship with the Soviet state in which he worked remains enigmatic. In his memoirs, published outside the Soviet Union after his death, he says that his loyalty to the system was a sham. The book, although certainly ghost-written, seems now to be accepted as genuine. 

The first of his two cello concertos was composed in the summer of 1959; it had its first performance in Saint Petersburg in October of the same year, with its dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich, as soloist. Shostakovich was by then universally recognized as the leading composer of his country, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. He had been elected first secretary of the Composers’ Union of the Russian Republic and was being considered for membership in the Communist Party. He had recently been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University and had visited the United States twice that year to supervise performances and recordings of his works. 

But for an artist or an intellectual, things were far from easy in the Soviet Union. Boris Pasternak’s novel, Doctor Zhivago, had been published in western Europe in 1957. Although nobody in the Soviet Union had been allowed to read it, it was systematically vilified, and the author was compelled to refuse the Nobel Prize. A widespread dissident movement developed, leading to another round of repression, and some dissidents were confined to psychiatric hospitals. We cannot be sure about Shostakovich’s reaction to these events. Certainly, he must have felt the pressure to conform, and to produce music acceptable to the regime. Cello Concerto No. 1 was reviewed by the conductor Kiril Kondrashin in terms of Socialist Realism. To his ear, it was a work which avoided sinking into triviality, yet remained vivid and comprehensible to any alert listener. To others, however, it is an example of Shostakovich’s irony, as expressed in his memoirs. 

Program note by the late Dr. C.W. Helleiner.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major
Composed: 1959
Premiered: 1959, Saint Petersburg
Duration: 30 minutes

The music of Shostakovich cannot really be understood in isolation from its social context, but the composer’s relationship with the Soviet state in which he worked remains enigmatic. In his memoirs, published outside the Soviet Union after his death, he says that his loyalty to the system was a sham. The book, although certainly ghost-written, seems now to be accepted as genuine. 

The first of his two cello concertos was composed in the summer of 1959; it had its first performance in Saint Petersburg in October of the same year, with its dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich, as soloist. Shostakovich was by then universally recognized as the leading composer of his country, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. He had been elected first secretary of the Composers’ Union of the Russian Republic and was being considered for membership in the Communist Party. He had recently been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University and had visited the United States twice that year to supervise performances and recordings of his works. 

But for an artist or an intellectual, things were far from easy in the Soviet Union. Boris Pasternak’s novel, Doctor Zhivago, had been published in western Europe in 1957. Although nobody in the Soviet Union had been allowed to read it, it was systematically vilified, and the author was compelled to refuse the Nobel Prize. A widespread dissident movement developed, leading to another round of repression, and some dissidents were confined to psychiatric hospitals. We cannot be sure about Shostakovich’s reaction to these events. Certainly, he must have felt the pressure to conform, and to produce music acceptable to the regime. Cello Concerto No. 1 was reviewed by the conductor Kiril Kondrashin in terms of Socialist Realism. To his ear, it was a work which avoided sinking into triviality, yet remained vivid and comprehensible to any alert listener. To others, however, it is an example of Shostakovich’s irony, as expressed in his memoirs. 

Program note by the late Dr. C.W. Helleiner.