Violin Concerto No. 2 in C-sharp minor, Op. 129

Program notes

About the Work

Shostakovich wrote his Second Violin Concerto in the spring of 1967 for David Oistrakh, the violinist for whom he had written the First nearly twenty years earlier. It was meant as a present for Oistrakh’s sixtieth birthday that September. Shostakovich had the year wrong: Oistrakh, born in Odessa in 1908, was turning fifty-nine. The composer made up for it the following year with a violin sonata, written for the real anniversary.

Oistrakh played the concerto first at a closed performance in Bolshevo, outside Moscow, on 13 September 1967, and then in public in Moscow, both times with the Moscow Philharmonic under Kirill Kondrashin. It was the last of Shostakovich’s six concertos.

The two violin concertos are very different pieces. The First is a big public work in four movements, with a furious scherzo and a passacaglia at its centre. The Second, written by a man in poor health who had begun to lose friends and colleagues, is leaner and more inward. The orchestra is small. Four horns are the only brass, and the percussion is reduced to timpani and a tom-tom. The key, C-sharp minor, sits awkwardly on the violin, with few open strings to help the resonance, and that slightly veiled sound suits the music.

It belongs with the works of Shostakovich’s last decade, the late quartets and the final symphonies, in which textures thin out, single lines carry long stretches, and humour, when it appears, is dry. What keeps it from bleakness is the solo part. Shostakovich wrote it for Oistrakh’s singing tone, and long passages are simply melody over a spare accompaniment.

Christian Tetzlaff, the soloist in these concerts, has a phrase for how to approach it, quoted by the Berliner Philharmoniker: “Listen inwardly and give yourself time.”

What to Listen For

Moderato. Cellos and basses begin alone with a winding line. The violin enters above them with a theme that circles round a handful of notes and gradually opens out. A second, perkier idea arrives in the piccolo and is taken up by the soloist in plucked chords, with the tom-tom tapping underneath. Listen for a scrap of an Odessa street song, the bagel seller’s “Bubliki”, slipped in as a private greeting to Oistrakh. The cadenza is written in two voices, the violin accompanying itself, and the movement fades out to the tom-tom.

Adagio. The slow movement is in three parts, with an accompanied cadenza at the centre. It starts in the depths of the orchestra, and the violin’s long melody is joined by a solo flute. Near the end a solo horn is heard, as if from a distance, and its call leads straight into the finale.

Adagio, Allegro. After a short slow introduction the horn and the soloist trade rude remarks, and the rondo is off: a rough, stamping dance with the woodwind and horns answering back. The longest cadenza of the three comes late in the movement and looks back over material from earlier in the concerto. The ending is abrupt, punched home by timpani and tom-tom.