Wednesday 22 May: Concert Programme - London Symphony ...

Programme Notes
The LSO’s Principal Conductor Valery Gergiev
celebrates his 60th birthday with this special
gala concert. He starts, appropriately, with a
Russian classic …
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–75)
Piano Concerto No 2 in F major Op 102 (1957)
1 Allegro
2 Andante
3 Allegro
Alexander Toradze piano
Shostakovich could equally well have been a composer or a concert
pianist. He began to learn the piano with his mother, a professional
pianist, from the age of nine and in 1919, aged 13, he entered
the Leningrad Conservatory to study piano with Leonid Nikolayev
and composition with Maximilian Steinberg. In 1927 he won an
‘honourable mention’ as an entrant in the First International Chopin
Competition in Warsaw, but composition prevailed and between 1925
and 1933 he completed three symphonies, the First Piano Sonata,
and the operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,
as well as his tongue-in-cheek First Piano Concerto, scored for piano,
trumpet and strings.
24 years separated the composition of the First and Second Piano
Concertos, during which time Shostakovich’s youthful ebullience had
evaporated under a barrage of menacing, politically-inspired criticism
from the Soviet cultural party machine. While his First Concerto
had been written for himself to play, his Second was written for his
19-year-old son Maxim, a talented pianist who was applying to study
with Jacob Flier at the Moscow Conservatory. Father and son played
the Concerto in a two-piano arrangement in April 1957 at the USSR
Ministry of Culture: the piece was officially ‘approved’, and went
on to receive its public premiere in the Great Hall of the Moscow
Conservatory on 10 May 1957 with Maxim Shostakovich as soloist,
and the USSR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nikolai Anosov.
Shostakovich himself went on to record the solo part twice, but Maxim
only recorded it as a conductor (his preferred career), once with his
own son Dmitri as soloist.
The Second Concerto is light-hearted and uncomplicated in style.
It requires agile fingerwork rather than power, and the orchestra is
slimmed down, particularly in the weightier brass section, to allow
the piano part to cut through. Much of the material on which the
opening sonata-form Allegro is based is presented by the soloist in
octaves at the outset, and the movement contains a traditional but
short cadenza just before the recapitulation. The lyrical Andante
opens with strings in Shostakovich’s favourite sarabande rhythm,
while the piano’s initial phrase pays homage to the slow movement
of Beethoven’s Fifth Concerto. A piano link leads without a break into
the spirited Allegro finale, which plays with three contrasting ideas –
the perky initial theme, a riotous dance section in 7/8 rhythm, and a
parody of piano finger exercises.
Now the LSO is joined by the distinguished Greek violinist Leonidas
Kavakos, a former winner of the Paganini, Naumburg and International
Sibelius Competitions, for three virtuoso classics of the violin
repertoire, all influenced to some degree by the Central European
gypsy fiddler tradition.
Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840)
‘Rondo’ from Violin Concerto No 2 in B minor Op 7 (1826)
Leonidas Kavakos violin
The Italian violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini is still revered
as the greatest virtuoso of them all – a ‘wizard of the violin’ whose
technical mastery has never been equalled. At his 1813 debut concert
at La Scala, Milan, a critic wrote: ‘He is without question the foremost
and greatest violinist in the world. His playing is truly inconceivable.
He performs certain passage-work, leaps, and double stops that have
never been heard from any violinist’. Such extraordinary virtuosity –
partly facilitated by his extremely long, thin fingers – together with
his gaunt, rather sinister appearance (he may have suffered from
Marfan’s syndrome), triggered rumours that he had sold his soul to
4 Programme Notes