25 September programme - London Symphony Orchestra

Rodion Shchedrin (b 1932)
Piano Concerto No 5 (1999)
Allegretto moderato
Andante
Allegro assai
Denis Matsuev piano
Since Prokofiev and Shostakovich, the number of front-rank
composers who could also claim to be first-rate concert pianists has
dwindled remarkably, and of the remaining few, hardly any have made
piano music as strong a feature of their output as Rodion Shchedrin.
Trained as a composer under Yuri Shaporin and as a pianist under
Yakov Flier, he has composed six piano concertos to date, as well as a
substantial body of solo piano works.
In this area Shchedrin has generally shown more affinity for Prokofiev
than for Shostakovich, especially the concertos, which at least initially
were marked by vivid colours, forceful energy and total absence of
self-doubt. His First Piano Concerto, for instance, a graduation piece
from 1954, was a cheerfully extrovert romp that could have been
designed as a tribute to Prokofiev, who had died the previous year.
Twelve years later, the Second Concerto retained that influence,
alongside a playful indulgence in twelve-note techniques.
However, nearly 20 years separate the first three piano concertos,
all of which Shchedrin premiered and recorded with himself as soloist,
from the last three (No 3 was composed in 1973, No 4 in 1991).
In this second phase, exhibitionism gives way to a more private,
exploratory tone.
The Fifth Piano Concerto was composed in 1999 for Finnish pianistcomposer
Olli Mustonen, who gave the premiere in October that
year with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under Esa-Pekka
Salonen. Indeed the first movement seems initially designed to
showcase Mustonen’s trademark pecking staccato touch, which is set
off firstly against slow, singing lines, then against attractively scored
scalic flourishes. The extended central section is slightly slower as
well as weightier in tone, and it eventually inspires a more songful
transformation of the opening material. This lengthy movement closes
with a brief return of textures from the first section.
4 Programme Notes
The slow movement opens with an austere orchestral chorale, which
the piano immediately takes up in a short cadenza. Ghosts of the first
movement pass across the stage, but the main musical character
seems to focus on four-note descending figures, highly malleable
but almost always song-like.
In essence a perpetuum mobile, the finale deliberately emulates
the ‘crescendo with music’ of Ravel’s Bolero. For long stretches this
movement demands greater virtuosity from the orchestra than the
soloist, at least in terms of rhythmical precision. Finally the soloist cuts
loose in a cadenza worthy of Shostakovich for its manic leaps, and
when the orchestra rejoins it is with a Prokofievian style mécanique in
overdrive, concluding the work with its most physically exciting pages.
Shchedrin programme notes and profile © David Fanning
David Fanning is a professor of music at the University of Manchester.
He is an expert on Shostakovich, Nielsen and Soviet music. He is also
a reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, Gramophone and BBC Radio 3.
INTERVAL: 20 minutes
I still today continue to be convinced that
the decisive factor for each composition is
intuition. As soon as composers relinquish
their trust in this intuition and rely in its
place on musical ‘religions’ such as serialism,
aleatoric composition, minimalism or
other methods, things become problematic.
Rodion Shchedrin
Rodion Shchedrin (b 1932)
The Man
The generation of Soviet composers after Shostakovich produced
charismatic and exotic figures such as Galina Ustvolskaya,
Alfred Schnittke and Sofiya Gubaydulina, whose music was initially
controversial but then gained cult status. At the other end of the
stylistic spectrum it featured highly gifted craftsmen such as
Boris Tishchenko, Boris Tchaikovsky and Mieczysław Weinberg, all
of whom worked more or less within the parameters laid down by
Shostakovich and were highly respected in their heyday but gradually
fell from favour.
Somewhere in between we can locate Rodion Shchedrin – an
individualist with a broader and more consistent appeal, who could
turn himself chameleon-like to virtuoso pranks or to profound
philosophical reflection, to Socialist Realist opera or to folkloristic
Concertos for Orchestra (a particular speciality), to technically solid
Preludes and Fugues, to jazz, and, when he chose, even to twelvenote
constructivism.
Trained at the Moscow Conservatoire in the 1950s, as a composer
under Yuri Shaporin and as a pianist under Yakov Flier in the early
years of the Post-Stalinist Thaw, Shchedrin was one of
the first to speak out against the constraints of
musical life in the Soviet Union. He went on to play
a significant administrative role in the country’s
musical life, heading the Russian Union of Composers
from 1973 to 1990. Married since 1958 to the star
Soviet ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, he established a
significant power-base from which he was able to promote
not only his own music but also that of others – such as
Schnittke, whose notorious First Symphony received its
sensational premiere only thanks to Shchedrin’s support.
An unashamed eclectic, and suspicious of dogma from
either the arch-modernist or arch-traditionalist wings of
Soviet music, Shchedrin occupied a not always comfortable
position, both in his pronouncements and in his creative
work. With one foot in the national-traditional camp and the
other in that of the internationalist-progressives, he was
tagged with the unkind but not unfair label of the USSR’s
Rodion Shchedrin © www.lebrecht.co.uk
‘official modernist’. From 1992 he established a second home in
Munich, but he still enjoyed official favour in post-Soviet Russia,
adding steadily to his already impressive roster of prizes.
Shchedrin has summed up his artistic credo as follows: ‘I continue to
be convinced that the decisive factor for each composition is intuition.
As soon as composers relinquish their trust in this intuition and rely in
its place on musical ‘religions’ such as serialism, aleatoric composition,
minimalism or other methods, things become problematic.’
Programme Notes
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