Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No.2, Op.126 (1966)

Largo
Allegretto – Allegretto

The day I greeted Dmitri Dmitrievich at York station, back in November 1972 (when he came to hear the Fitzwilliam play his latest string quartet), his second cello concerto was just six years old! He looked decidedly frail, despite his bear-like physique, having recently suffered (amongst other misfortunes) a stroke and a road accident. But not long before completing the concerto he had survived his first serious heart attack – during the night of May 28/9 1966, after coming out of “retirement” as a pianist to accompany Galina Vishnevskaya in a group of his own songs. He had become so stressed about this ordeal that, even though he acquitted himself well in the concert, he made himself desperately ill in the process. He had had to face poor health on and off for most of his life, but now a lurking fear was turning into a reality: human mortality – his own mortality – was staring him in the face, and it inevitably coloured the remainder of his life and work. So this concerto proved to be the first of a series of major compositions – including the last symphonies and quartets – which together constitute a deeply moving and sometimes harrowing testament to his final years. They stand apart from the rest of his output for a number of reasons, but that fateful night might well have represented a dividing line over which he could never return.

There are two special characteristics which most of these late works share. The first parallels Stravinsky in that Schönbergian twelve-note rows became a new feature (but not for a couple more years: the opening of the concerto is indeed so chromatic that most of the twelve tones do appear, but not yet in a prescribed order). The other relates more to Schubert, whose last years were dominated by a terror of approaching doom hastened by irreversible physical disease. But from the demise of his father in 1922, up to that time of life when advanced age inevitably takes its toll on one’s contemporaries, it refused to go away: not only did Shostakovich suffer the loss of his (first) wife Nina, but for a long period he had to endure the disappearance of many friends and colleagues. Yet he never really learned to come to terms with death – and here lies the psychological root of these last compositions. One cannot stop the tread of Time; one cannot even slow it or quicken it; but one can be less aware of it. Shostakovich later helped us to do that in the first movement of the fifteenth quartet, whose stillness affords us the priceless opportunity of challenging the very passing of Time – as also do the late Adagios of Beethoven and Bruckner, not to mention much of his own second cello concerto. But in the central section of the thirteenth quartet he can, in a sinister way, do exactly the opposite by inexorably counting out every beat of Time. Likewise in the utterly original and unforgettable opening of the last work of all (the viola sonata, where plucked open strings set up a steady rhythmic pulse); and at the very end of the fifteenth symphony, whose large array of percussion sets up a hypnotic and seemingly endless rhythmic tapping. Commentators have linked this amazing passage to the conclusion of the much earlier fourth symphony, forgetting that the end of the far less familiar second cello concerto had already tried out the idea. Foreshadowing the two above-mentioned quartets, a sense of the all-pervasive inevitability of Time is subtly underlined by instructing the concerto to be played at the same pulse (one hundred beats per minute) throughout. All his life Shostakovich had worked with some of the finest performers in the world – including, of course, his close friends the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina (who had been the singer that night in May 1966). Both cello concertos were written for him, and No.1 achieved instant and lasting success. More upbeat than its darkly introspective successor, it featured a big part for the principal horn, which was then given the same prominence again in No.2 – notably when the second movement metamorphoses without a break into the third, but now with both horns braying out the most brazen of fanfares. Indeed, Op.126 at times feels almost like a sinfonia concertante, such is the frequency with which other players step out into the limelight (not least the various percussionists) to partner the solo cello – occasionally to frightening effect….. But there is perhaps a still stronger sense of the soloist(s) being at the centre of a chamber-music-like intimacy, where inwardness and privacy replace the outgoing display normally expected in a concerto. Yet this is no more a feature here than in any of his last works, whose spareness and weirdness tease us and tantalise us with their strangely elliptical moods.

© Alan George
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