Cello Concerto No. 2

Concertos are often described as musical depictions of a relationship between an individual (the soloist) and society at large (the orchestra). This relationship can take many forms, from friendly agreement to bitter rivalry. Such an approach is particularly fruitful when it comes to the concertos of Dmitri Shostakovich. After all, the communist regime, under which he spent all but the first decade of his life, made a great deal of the relationship between the individual and society. But in this case, the needs of the individual were almost always subordinated to those of society, a state of affairs that only music — the most abstract of the arts — could afford to question openly.

At the beginning of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto, the soloist plays a slow, sad melody without accompani­ment. The “community” enters only gradually: lower strings and harps first, the rest of the orchestra much later in the movement. Instead of a traditional exposition, where the orchestra gets a chance to flex its collective muscles, we are treated to a solitary meditation. The tragic soliloquy of the cello is eventually (but only temporarily) relieved by the entrance of the woodwinds and xylophone. For the first time, the orchestra gives the soloist a real response and, for a while, it seems that a meaningful interaction can develop between the two. But this proves to be an illusion, and the dark mood of the piece returns.

The second movement is one of those Shostakovich scherzos where the boundary between lighthearted humor and biting sarcasm is completely blurred. Its principal melody, as Shostakovich himself acknowledged in a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman, is very similar to a street song from Odesa: “Kupite bubliki” (Buy donuts). “I cannot explain the reason why,” he added. Whatever the reason, this innocent little ditty is soon subjected to a series of extraordinary transformations, its playfulness gradually giving way to a sense of utter despair.

Without pause, the scherzo is soon followed by the third movement, which begins with a menacing horn fanfare. Responding to the challenge of the “outside world,” the soloist takes over the fanfare theme for the ensuing cadenza, presenting some highly virtuosic elaborations that eventually calm down with an idyllic figure that seems to emerge from some distant world. The entire movement is in some way based on the fanfare material, yet whatever harmony has been reached is mercilessly destroyed by a wild irruption of the “bubliki” theme — now sounding positive­ly tragic — in the entire orchestra. What is left is the cello’s wistful recapitulation of earlier themes (including the begin­ning of the first movement) and a coda featuring the mysterious ticking of the woodblock, tom-tom, and tambourine.

Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concer­to is a very different kind of piece than the First, both written for Mstislav Rostropovich. During the seven years separating the two works, Shostakovich’s health had deteriorated seriously and a sense of deep pessimism had begun to take hold of him. The late 1950s were known as a period of “thaw” following Stalin’s death; by the 1960s, the Brezhnev era was bringing a new “freeze.” At age 60, Shostakovich was a man broken by decades of changing political fortunes, during which he received high praise from the Communist Party one day and feared for his life the next.

Even now, his political troubles were far from being over. Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor who had led many of Shostakovich’s works since the 1930s, refused to conduct the premiere of the composer’s Symphony No. 13 in 1962, which was based on Yevgeny Yevtushen­ko’s poem about the Nazi massacre of Jews in the Ukrainian village of Babi Yar during World War II. In 1966, Mravinsky likewise cancelled plans to conduct the premiere of the Second Cello Concerto on Shostakovich’s 60th birthday. (It was ultimately led by conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov.) According to the official record, he hadn’t had time to learn the score. It is more likely, however, that he had grasped it only too well, and this music was always potentially “danger­ous,” even without a controversial poem making those dangers explicit.

It is clear to anyone who listens to this music that the “individual” and the “society” in the Second Cello Concerto do not form one big happy family, as communist teachings about the new classless society would have it. Instead, their relationship is deeply troubled and remains unresolved at the end of the piece.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.