Read on to discover why the Second Cello Concerto of Shostakovich was initially dismissed by the British press...
Shostakovich Second Cello Concerto... a London premiere in 1966
Initial impressions of a work can often be wide of the mark. Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto is a case in point. Its first Western performance took place in London in October 1966 with the work’s dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich, as soloist, partnered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis.
The Royal Festival Hall was packed to capacity for an all-Shostakovich programme at which the composer was to receive the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious Gold Medal. In the event, however, ill health prevented Shostakovich from accepting the award in person, and the Soviet ambassador was drafted in to receive it on the composer’s behalf.
Shostakovich Second Cello Concerto... a mixed reception from the critics
Newspaper reviews of the concert were decidedly mixed. No-one questioned Rostropovich’s charismatic delivery of the solo part, but grave doubts were expressed as to the quality of the work itself. Stephen Walsh, writing in The Observer, was particularly harsh, calling the concerto disjointed: ‘The new piece suffers from a sort of musical inflation: too many ideas put to too little use; an episodic structure which tries to convince us that mere repetition can be a substitute for a properly worked out development.’
Even more cutting was a short piece in the Daily Express under the crude headline ‘This one wouldn’t have won the medal.’ Although acknowledging Shostakovich’s achievement in creating many works that had ‘greatly enriched the world’s musical heritage’, the newspaper’s writer doubted whether ‘the new concerto would stand high among them’. He complained that ‘after a slow, mostly inward-looking first movement, the musical invention becomes more of a song and dance, sentimental and even skittish at times, declining by the end into the merest whimsy’.
Shostakovich Second Cello Concerto... a disappointment after the dynamic First
A detailed review in The Times was slightly more balanced, conceding that the concerto might not ‘blaze any new trails’, but that it shows that ‘some of the old ones are not worn out’. But the writer was far less complimentary about the finale, arguing that its musical invention was on a lower plane than that of the rest of the concerto.
The general consensus that emerges from all these reviews was that this work was something of a disappointment in comparison with the direct and hard-hitting First Cello Concerto of 1959. Indeed, to this day, the Second remains far less frequently played than its predecessor. But more recently, writers have provided a far more nuanced understanding of the work, placing greater emphasis on the deeply unsettling and often ambiguous subtext of its musical language.
Shostakovich Second Cello Concerto... a re-evaluation
In this respect, it is fascinating to consider two newspaper reviews of a 1991 performance of the Second Concerto given in London by the Austrian cellist Heinrich Schiff. Gerald Larner, writing in The Guardian, declared that ‘a work like Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto requires thoughtful listening. It is not difficult to follow on a bar-by-bar basis and it is not unentertaining. But what it means, what motivates its more grotesque gestures, these are the imponderables which make the work so interesting’.
These ‘imponderables’ are vividly laid bare in Richard Morrison’s insightful appraisal in The Times: ‘The atmosphere of dislocation is so utter and irrevocable that one doubts whether Shostakovich made any conscious choice about how to write it. This work is the rebellion of a very ill man against a very sick society. Every tortured bar signals a fracture between speech and sense, as if Shostakovich had internalised the horror of the society in which he lived. Familiar “friends” horn fanfares, elegant Baroque trills are coerced into a grotesque danse macabre without rhyme or reason. Unimportant little motifs are muttered over and over: the obsessive babble of the paranoid.’
