Czech Philharmonic • Tokyo

Maurice Ravel did not leave behind a large musical legacy. Some biographers claim this was because of the composer’s other activities—he was also working as a concert pianist, a conductor, and a teacher. Others say it was his meticulousness and the exacting standards he set for himself. He wrote a number of individual compositions and cycles of pieces for his own instrument, the piano, including music for solo piano, for piano four-hands, and for two pianos. He also wrote two piano concertos, both during his late creative period, composing them simultaneously between 1929 and 1931. The Piano Concerto in D major for the left hand was written on commission for the one-handed pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961), who had also asked other composers of his day to write works for his repertoire.

In his Piano Concerto in G major, Ravel employed a variety of stylistic resources ranging from Spanish folk elements to the jazz influences of his day. He conceived the orchestral accompaniment in an original manner, giving various instruments room to play solo passages. The two outer movements contrast effectively with the melancholy central Adagio. The first movement in sonata form surprisingly repeats material from the development section after the recapitulation and cadenza. The slow movement opens with a long piano solo, with wind instruments taking up the theme one after another. The theme itself has been compared to that of the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The winds also play a major role in the orchestration of the rondo finale.

Ravel expected that, as with other works he had written, he would himself be the concerto’s first performer: “It was an interesting experience to work on both concertos at the same time. The one I will be playing myself is a concerto in the true sense of the word. What I mean is that it is written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. In my opinion, the music of a solo concerto has to be light and brilliant, and it should not strive for depth or for dramatic effects”, he wrote. However, problems with Ravel’s health prevented him from playing the piano part. The concerto was premiered on 14 January 1932 with Marguerite Long as the soloist and with Ravel leading the orchestra. The two artists then embarked on a four-month tour, during which they also played the new concerto on 18 February 1932 at a philharmonic concert of the New German Theatre in Prague: “A delicately crafted, polished composition full of spirit, taste, and precision, and a work of art clear as crystal, elegant, and lively”, wrote a Prague critic. “The piano part allows for both mechanistic playing and Lisztian virtuosity, though musicality is required above all in the difficult harmonic passages.” The audience even insisted that the final movement be repeated.

During the Second World War, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) composed three symphonies. He wrote his Ninth in 1945, between the war’s end in Europe and its conclusion in the Pacific. At the premiere on 3 November, Stalin had expected a grandiose work with chorus and vocal soloists, but instead Shostakovich presented a symphony that was shorter than the first movement of either of its two predecessors, that was optimistic, and that formally and sonically resembled the classical symphonies of Mozart. It is not as intellectually weighty as its two predecessors, nor is it by any means as monumental as the famous “Ninths” by Beethoven or Mahler. The composer said he started thinking about the Seventh before the war had begun, but most of it was written in the last months of 1941. In September, German troops besieged Leningrad, and Shostakovich’s native city and its inhabitants remained under a cruel and devastating blockade for 872 days. That October, Shostakovich and his family were evacuated to Kuybyshev (now Samara), he finished the symphony in December, and it was premiered in early March. A few months later, on 9 August 1942, the Seventh was also heard in Leningrad itself under dramatic circumstances thanks to the enormous personal efforts of everyone involved. The work quickly got the name Leningrad Symphony and became a symbol of Russia’s indomitable spirit, determination, and resistance to Nazism.

Shostakovich escaped the horrifying conditions in besieged Leningrad, but the war itself remained present in his life. Immediately after the June invasion, he volunteered repeatedly to join the army, but the officials and commissars turned him down each time so he could devote himself to his civilian vocation, so he gave concerts, composed, and taught at the conservatoire, where he patrolled the roof as a volunteer fireman. After finishing his Seventh Symphony, he said he wanted to begin composing an oratorio about the heroic defenders of Moscow, an opera, and a ballet. In the end, however, he channelled his energies into work on another symphony written during the summer of 1943, which he spent in the city Ivanovo north of Moscow. “In recent days, I finished work on my new Eighth Symphony. I wrote it rather quickly, in a bit over two months. […] It lacks any kind of narrative. It just reflects my thoughts and experiences and my reactions to joyous news about victories of the Red Army. This new work of mine is a peculiar attempt to gaze into the future, into the post-war era”, Shostakovich wrote on 18 September for the weekly journal Literature and the Arts.

That February, the Soviet army had been victorious at Stalingrad, and as a Soviet composer he was expected to write a symphony that was celebratory and heroic. Notwithstanding the composer’s public proclamations, his Eighth is nothing of the kind. Against the backdrop of great battlefield victories, Shostakovich saw not triumph, but millions of ruined lives, despair, and the futility of a war that was corroding both society and the individual from within. During the Great Terror of the 1930s, Stalin had many of Shostakovich’s friends executed, and the composer spent nearly his whole life in fear that he would meet a similar fate. Having become popular in the West as well, especially after the success of the Leningrad Symphony, Shostakovich sometimes enjoyed the protection of the regime, but at other times he suffered criticism, threats, and humiliation. He therefore became a master of irony. He said one thing while thinking something else, but it was through his music that he could be the most sincere. That is what the Eighth Symphony is like: here ironic, there sincere, and at times even absurd, just as war and living in wartime seemed absurd to Shostakovich.

Shostakovich characterised his Eighth as a work full of dramatic internal conflicts. This applies both to its philosophical meaning and to the music itself. The first movement is characteristic in this regard, beginning at a slow tempo and in a gloomy mood, alternating in places with lyrical episodes for the woodwinds. One of the longest movements in any of Shostakovich’s symphonies, it reaches its climax around its midpoint, when a gradual crescendo arrives at a powerful forte Allegro. The seemingly chaotic sound of the roaring orchestra is put into order by a strong but irregular march rhythm. The first movement ends slowly and quietly, but the music’s character remains more threatening than conciliatory. The threat becomes reality in the second, third, and fourth movements. Each is a march in its own way—the second with ironic elements in a dance-like scherzo, and the fourth like a dark, sluggish funeral march. A certain calming and catharsis finally arrives with the concluding Allegretto in the form of lyrical melodic passages and pastoral motifs, but here, too, there is no lack of dramatic episodes, and even the lyrical-sounding conclusion in C major is haunted by dark echoes in the contrabass. “I can express the philosophical idea of my new work very briefly in just three words: life is beautiful. All that is evil and ugly will disappear, and beauty will triumph”, Shostakovich wrote in Literature and the Arts. It is up to everyone who listens to the Eighth Symphony to judge how ironically or sincerely those words were meant.