Dmitri Shostakovich

The graduation piece of a nineteen-year-old student who had lost his father and was playing accompaniment in movie theaters. It holds both the wit of a silent-film pianist and the shadows of youth.

• Listen to the brief dialogue at the opening of the first movement between the trumpet, played with a mute (a stopper that softens the sound), and the bassoon. Mocking and playful, like a puppet show on a stage, its tone announces the character of the whole work.
• In the second-movement scherzo, the piano enters not as a concerto soloist but as one more instrument of the orchestra, hammering out rapidly rising and falling scales and forceful chords.
• The oboe solo of the third movement begins as a slow, lonely melody and gradually swells into something heavier. Listen with the thought that it was written just after he lost his father, and its weight feels different.
• The passage at the heart of the fourth movement where the timpani pounds out a loud solo on its own is the most talked-about moment in the work. It is also counted among the classic showpieces for comparing timpanists’ skill.

The comeback symphony, written in the thick of the Great Purge after “Muddle Instead of Music.” Officially it was a ‘response to just criticism,’ but audiences heard something else in it.

• At the opening of the first movement, the strings take up in turn a melody that jumps widely between high and low notes (wide leaps). From the very first sound, a sharp, uneasy tension is laid down.
• The third-movement Largo leaves out the brass entirely and divides the strings into many finely split parts. Accounts survive of many listeners weeping during this movement at the premiere.
• In the closing pages of the finale, the note la (A) is repeated endlessly while the timpani and bass drum pound. Whether this is genuine triumph or forced rejoicing is still debated today.
• Because readings of the score’s tempo marking differ, that same ending of the finale is played slow and heavy by some conductors, fast and brilliant by others. Compare several recordings and the work leaves a very different impression.

Begun in besieged Leningrad and completed in Kuibyshev, where he had been evacuated. When starving musicians performed it in the besieged city, it became a symbol of the war.

• In the so-called ‘invasion episode’ at the heart of the first movement, while the snare drum repeats the same rhythm to the very end, a simple march tune is repeated more than eleven times, growing steadily louder. The passage is often compared to Maurice Ravel’s Boléro.
• The march tune begins light and comical, but as the brass join in it turns into a huge, merciless sound. This is the very tune Bartók quoted mockingly in his Concerto for Orchestra.
• The third-movement Adagio opens with a passage in which the woodwinds sing in harmony like a church hymn (chorale). The composer once said he had captured scenes of his home city in this movement.
• At the end of the finale, the first theme of the first movement returns loudly in the brass. Listen for the moment when, after long darkness, it ends on a bright C major chord.

Written in the year of the Zhdanov resolution and kept in a drawer for 7 years. Only after Stalin’s death did it come before the world, with Oistrakh as soloist.

• The first movement, ‘Nocturne,’ has the violin singing in its low, dark register as if drawing long breaths. It is an opening like a soliloquy, the very opposite of a dazzling concerto’s start.
• In the second-movement scherzo, the composer’s name motif (DSCH) appears in hiding alongside a melody like a Jewish folk dance. Follow the sharply bouncing rhythms of the violin.
• The third movement, a passacaglia, has the cellos and double basses repeat the same bass line while the violins build variations above it. It is the tragic movement on which the whole work's weight rests.
• The long cadenza (a passage the soloist plays alone) at the end of the third movement is a notorious hurdle among violinists. The story goes that when Oistrakh asked for a moment to catch his breath, the composer handed the finale's opening melody over to the orchestra.

He wrote this cycle after returning from Leipzig, where he had marked the 200th anniversary of Bach's death. In a time of terror, he stepped inside Bach's forms and quietly kept hold of his own voice.

• The Prelude No. 1 in C major recalls No. 1 of Book 1 of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, also in C major. Hear the two side by side and it becomes clear that this work is a greeting to Bach.
• The pieces move in order through pairs of a major key and its relative minor: C major, A minor, G major, E minor, and so on. It is the same order as Chopin's 24 Preludes.
• In each fugue, a single melody is taken up in turn by several parts (voices), as in a round. Listen for the moments when the same melody reappears in the right hand or the left.
• The final fugue, No. 24 in D minor, is a monumental close that stacks two subjects one atop the other. The recording by Tatiana Nikolayeva, who gave the premiere, is still regarded as the benchmark.

He wrote it in three days near Dresden, just after joining the Communist Party. The official dedication was to the victims of war, but to a friend he confided that it was a memorial piece for himself.

• At the opening of the first movement, the cello slowly plays the composer's name figure, D-E♭-C-B (DSCH), and the other instruments take it up one by one. The entire work grows out of these four notes.
• Quotations from his own earlier works are scattered throughout. Listen for the Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5, the Jewish melody from the Piano Trio No. 2, the Cello Concerto No. 1, and a melody from Lady Macbeth.
• The second movement is a fast movement in which the four instruments race along as if possessed, and the Jewish dance melody from the Piano Trio No. 2 bursts out like a scream.
• Some hear the loud chords that strike three times over in the fourth movement as a knock on the door in the night. This movement also contains the melody of the old Russian revolutionary song “Tormented by Grievous Bondage.”

His last work, completed on his sickbed a few weeks before his death. He brought it to a close like a farewell addressed to Beethoven.

• At the opening of the first movement, the viola plucks its strings with the fingers instead of the bow (pizzicato), sounding a bare, empty fifth. This unadorned beginning sets the quiet mood of the whole work.
• The second movement draws on material from The Gamblers, an opera after Gogol that he began in the 1940s and abandoned. Its staggering, comic rhythms stand in contrast to the silence of the movements around it.
• The triplet figure the piano plays in the third movement comes from the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Above it, the viola sings a long, low melody.
• At the end, the viola and piano gradually fade, closing as though the sound itself were vanishing. Hold your breath and listen until the very moment the last note dies away.