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Composed in 1957 for his son Maxim’s graduation recital, the Second Piano Concerto is regarded by some as one of Shostakovich’s lesser works. Shostakovich himself said that it had “no redeeming artistic merits.” Nonetheless, he performed it often and recorded it on LP, leading many to conclude that his harsh appraisal was actually a swipe at the Soviet establishment, for whom “redeeming artistic merit” was music that expressed socialist ideals.
A patriotic tract the Second Piano Concerto is certainly not. What it is—and what makes so many of us love it—is droll and high-spirited and, in the great second movement Andante, ravishingly beautiful. As with so much of Shostakovich’s music there is an element of satire in the opening and closing Allegros, where the piano capers against military drum tattoos and joins in a closing march (with high-flying piccolo). But it is that sad, slow, gorgeous Andante that makes the work so treasurable. It may be the most beautiful music Shostakovich ever wrote.
I know of no other performance as magically “right” as this one from Bernstein, who not only conducts but plays the piano part. The sound here is even better—fuller, warmer—than on the original Columbia.
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
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