19 November programme - London Symphony Orchestra

Rodion Shchedrin (b 1932)
Piano Concerto No 4 (‘Sharp Keys’) (1991)
1 Sostenuto cantabile – Allegretto – Sostenuto
2 ‘Russian Chimes’ – Allegro
Olli Mustonen 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 in 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 an 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 to a commission
from the Steinway Foundation). In this second phase, exhibitionism
gives way to a more private, exploratory tone.
According to the composer, ‘The entire [Fourth Piano Concerto] is
in the sharp keys; there is not a single flat in the score’. This is true,
though the ‘sharp keys’ are rarely heard in anything approaching
their pure form. Rather, the first movement, for instance, is poised
somewhere on the arc between A, E, and B majors. Shchedrin’s
explanation for his compositional conceit is somewhat curious:
‘This is both a conscious self-limitation (my own form of minimalism)
and at the same time a wish to create the richest possible acoustic
atmosphere for my piano soloist – one saturated with overtones’.
Why he should consider sharp keys to contain more overtones than
flat ones remains a mystery.
6 Programme Notes
The first movement is dominated by the piano’s rhapsodic roulades,
reminiscent of the trance-like slow movement of Michael Tippett’s
Piano Concerto. A brief spiky dialogue and a soliloquising transition
lead into a central Allegretto that develops into an episode of
toccata-like brilliance, interspersed with more martial figures (marked
‘fanfare-like’). A dismissive downward flourish on the piano concludes
the movement, at the same time as providing the material for the
second movement, headed ‘Russian Chimes’.
Here Shchedrin’s explanation is entirely pertinent: ‘I wanted to include
… the ‘alphabet’ of Ancient Russian change-ringing … Here I have
in mind the ringing of holidays, celebratory, paschal, what in Russian
is so appropriately called by the wonderful word blagovest – Glad
Tidings’. It is in this movement, too, that he realises his intent to make
‘full use of the extreme registers of the piano … so especially bright
and ringing in the Steinway’. The increasingly manic tintinnabulations
eventually give way to a return of the Sostenuto cantabile mood from
the first movement, albeit now carrying a calm version of the ‘Chimes’
theme. The piano then offers a musing postscript before the orchestra
joins in to give the concerto an applause-inviting send-off.
Programme note © David Fanning
David Fanning is 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 Magazine and
BBC Radio 3.
INTERVAL: 20 minutes
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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