Dmitry Borisovich Kabalevsky (1904-1987)
Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2
An equivocal figure in Russian music of the Soviet era,
Dmitry Borisovich Kabalevsky was born in St
Petersburg on 30th December 1904. He studied at the
Moscow Conservatory with both Nicolay Myaskovsky
and Alexander Goldenweiser, graduating in
composition (1929) then piano (1930), and was
appointed a senior lecturer in 1932 and a full professor
in 1939. Riding out the ideological storm of the 1920s as
a member of both the progressive Association of Soviet
Musicians and the ‘conservative’ Russian Association
of Proletarian Musicians, he found his mature style in
the following decade, notably through two works which
achieved international success: the Second Symphony
(1934), championed by conductors such as Arturo
Toscanini and Malcolm Sargent, evinces the drama and
lyricism that Prokofiev made central to his music on
returning to the Soviet Union; the opera Colas
Breugnon (1938), based on the novel by Romain
Rolland, combines Western European neo-Classicism
and stylized Russian folk-music to potent dramatic
effect.
Although his suite The Comedians (1940) has
enjoyed a lasting popularity, and his work for the theatre
and cinema gained an official approval such that he was
one of the few significant Soviet composers not to be
censored by the notorious ‘Zhdanov Decree’ of 1948
(though some commentators believe he only avoided
being blacklisted by persuading officials to substitute
Myaskovsky’s name for his own), Kabalevsky was
unable to sustain a comparable level of success in his
music of the post-war era. His later operas failed to hold
the Soviet stage, and though certain piano works,
notably the Second and Third Piano Sonatas (1945 and
1946), and the 24 Preludes (1944), have remained at the
periphery of the modern repertoire, his greatest success
was with such works as the Cello Sonata (1962) and the
Second Cello Concerto (1964), whose often brooding
and introspective manner feel essentially at odds with
the rôle of the dutiful citizen to which Kabalevsky
aspired as a Soviet artist, and that led him openly to
criticize those younger colleagues who pursued a more
experimental path in the 1960s and 1970s.
Seen from this perspective, Kabalevsky’s most
lasting achievement was in the field of music education,
notably his development in later years of a programme
for music in schools which, along with his piano and
choral output for children and young people, offers
similarities with the didactic activities of older
contemporaries such as Zoltán Kodály and Carl Orff.
Save for some elegiac song-cycles and a Fourth Piano
Concerto, he completed few significant works in the
decade prior to his death in Moscow on 14th February
1987.
Although he composed four symphonies, as well as
overtures, tone poems and suites, Kabalevsky’s
sequence of concertos, four for piano, two for cello and
one for violin, rank as his most significant orchestral
music. Written in a direct and generally accessible
manner, they respect the strictures of Soviet musical
policy over the decades without being overly simplistic
or meretricious. Indeed, the trilogy of ‘Youth
Concertos’ (comprising that for violin of 1948, the first
for cello of 1949 and the third for piano of 1952) is one
of the few instances of ‘abstract’ orchestral music to
have found official favour in the culturally fraught years
prior to Stalin’s death in 1953. Composed at,
respectively, the time of the Soviet leader’s accession to
power and just before the climax of the ‘Great Terror’
aimed at purging all ‘undesirable’ elements from Soviet
society, the first two piano concertos demonstrate the
range of Kabalevsky’s musical idiom during probably
the most eventful phase of his career.
The First Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 9, is
among Kabalevsky’s earliest works. Written in 1928,
and first given in Moscow on 11th December 1931 with
the composer as soloist, it briefly earned him the cachet
of being Moscow’s ‘answer’ to Shostakovich, who was
Kabalevsky’s junior by almost two years. While
Rachmaninov can be discerned in the melodic profile
and orchestration, Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, already
an international success, even though barely a decade
old, is a yet more potent influence on the musical
content.
The opening movement begins with a plaintive
woodwind melody, soon taken up by the soloist then
elaborated by the strings. A second theme for piano and
strings is more capricious, gaining in rhythmic urgency
before the initially pensive development section builds,
via some dexterous passagework for the soloist, to a
short-lived climax. The reprise ensues with an
elaboration mainly of the first theme, leading to its
emotive restatement. This dies away for a coda which,
though beginning quietly, ends with a brief but forceful
gesture. The halting theme that opens the slow
movement is passed between various wind instruments,
before being taken up by the soloist and given more
expressive treatment. There follows a series of
variations, energetic, wistful, passionate, lively,
subdued (albeit rising to the main climax) and fatalistic,
before the return of the introduction to create a
satisfying formal balance. Following without pause, the
finale begins with a quizzical gesture on woodwind,
then the soloist bursts in with an insistent theme that is
complemented by its poetic, slightly oriental-sounding
successor. Initiated by a brief cadenza, the development
rhapsodically draws on both themes, which the reprise
then varies with intensifying effect. The soloist now
initiates a lithe coda that brings the work to a decisive
close.
The Second Piano Concerto in G minor, Op. 23,
was composed in 1935, and revised as late as 1973. It
had its première in Moscow on 12th May 1936.
Prokofiev is an even more pervasive presence, though,
given the prevailing artistic climate when it was written,
Kabalevsky is mindful to keep the harmonic dissonance
on a tight if flexible rein. The first movement opens
with a lively and capering theme, its fleet successor
dealing mainly in rhythmic contrast. The development
section adopts a notably sardonic manner, suddenly
arriving at an expressive transformation of the second
theme. This new-found mood is continued in an
elaborate solo cadenza; then, after the climactic reemergence
of the orchestra, the movement closes with a
quizzical recall of the first theme. Cor anglais and brass
unfold a haunting theme that is to dominate the slow
movement. Taken up by piano and strings, then joined
by brass, it builds to a heavily chorded statement from
the soloist, forcefully underlined by full orchestra,
before a regretful close. It remains for the finale to wrap
up the piece in decisive fashion, its headlong theme
taking in a number of subsidiary ideas, none of which
can disturb the prevailing rhythmic motion on the way
to a martial climax and a scintillating conclusion.
Richard Whitehouse