Benjamin Britten (1913 — 1976)
Symphony for Cello & Orchestra op. 68
Britten wrote several works for the legendary Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. After a long spell of focusing mainly on vocal works - notably the War Requiem - he returned to the cello to create this 1963 work whose title reflects its large four-movement scale and the equal importance given to soloist and orchestra. Its mood suggests Britten’s preoccupation with war was not over.
The cello enters immediately with hard-struck double-stopped chords over tuba, contrabassoon and percussion. Elusive and changeable, the music quickly breaks from these low regions, putting theme-fragments into free play between cello and orchestra. The cello seems to feel out ideas which the orchestra sometimes echoes, sometimes challenges. The second movement is similarly fragmentary, filled with flashes of colour at virtuosic speed. Powerful chords with a hint of Baroque stateliness lift the Adagio out of the uneasiness of the first two movements. But it grows into an argument between the cello, foreboding timpani strikes, and ferocious brass chorales. The cello’s long emotionally intense cadenza forms a bridge to the fourth movement, announced by an unexpectedly sassy trumpet solo. The six variations that follow don’t all share that optimism, but the work closes with a somewhat ambiguous rise towards positivity.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 — 1975)
Symphony No. 3 op. 20 in Eb Major, The First of May
By 1929 Shostakovich surely doubted the Revolution was delivering on its promises. The dedicatee of his First Symphony, his friend Mikhail Kvadri, had been arrested and shot as Stalinism tightened its grip on the country’s intellectual life. So this May symphony has ambivalent meanings: possibly, as Shostakovich, expressing the “festive spirit of peaceful development” the Soviet state liked to promote. “This does not mean that the music in May is all glorifying and celebratory. Peaceful development is a most intense struggle,” Shostakovich added. Or perhaps, the symphony is a reminder of how far reality had strayed from the Communist dream.
The conductor Vasily Petrenko says, “By the Third you feel he’s really starting to be very ironic about the text and the message. The poetry he uses is banal, amateur, and he’s mocking it – showing how absurd and empty the words were.”
Shostakovich mentioned to a friend, “It would be interesting to write a symphony where not a single theme would be repeated.” This is it. The symphony begins with solo clarinets in a theme of Spring-like innocence. A perky march emerges briefly before the music becomes excited and rather chaotic. The concluding choral section is set to Semyon Kirsanov’s poem about the annual May Day parade celebrating the Day of International Solidarity of Workers. The preceding music certainly parades as many moods and ideas as the multiplicity of a crowd.