Mendelssohn & Shostakovich Violin Concertos - Hilary Hahn (2002)
Honestly, I put this on my week just because of a mention of a violinist playing Shostakovich in a book i just read. I’d love for this to become some sort of connective tissue where I explore the music that gets talked about in my reading.
And I’d love to tell you how much engaging fun I had reading There Is No Antimemetics Division, a bold sci fi novel that mixes puzzles and humor with spy thriller tropes and cosmic horror in a story I had trouble putting down.
But the point here is: a character in the novel is a concert violinist and mentions at one point playing Shostakovich without offering any detail. So let’s assume it’s a violin concerto, and let’s assume it’s Number 1 for no particular reason, and let’s find the recording by probably my favorite violinist, the always exacting and yet always heartfelt playing of Hilary Hahn.
This record starts with the Mendelssohn violin concerto. This is technically his second violin concerto. He wrote a concerto for violin and strings when he was still a teenager, but this one from the end of his illustrious life is the one anyone means when they pompously refer to a violin concerto as “the Mendelssohn.” (I know that’s pompous because I do it and I feel pompous when I do it)
Among the large number of violin concertos in the canon, Mendelssohn’s is one of the best-known and most frequently played. Hahn attacks it with precision, as you’d expect. But it’s not just a flurry of fancy technique. You feel each shift of mood as she takes you through it. Elegant, spectral, evocative. It’s a great combo of performer and text.
Then we get Shostakovich, a composer that I probably listen to more often than Mendelssohn. He wrote an incredible amount of music in his life, including two violin concertos.
This isn’t the place to talk about it in too much depth, but you have to understand how much of his life and his music revolved around how Joseph Stalin happened to be feeling on a particular day. Shostakovich was a towering figure in Soviet music, and that meant that you had to make the boss happy because everyone was watching. DS was a clever man. Rather than compromise on the music, he’d couch subtle criticism by making big “modern” gestures that Stalin could say was Soviet modernism and more recent listeners might call “bombast that makes fun of Stalin.”
This particular concerto didn’t have that problem because he didn’t publish it until after Stalin’s death, but it displays all the same subtext and doublespeak he included in things that did see daylight in the 40s.
You get that sense of two different narratives especially in the wild and wooly scherzo in movement 2, where you can pretty easily see the composer’s fraying psyche portrayed in what was also a bold knock against bourgeois western music. It’s worth mentioning that you also find the “DSCH” motif here, a little melodic piece that is him more or less signing his initials in the old German notation style that has an S and an H.
This piece also features a “cadenza”, the classical music equivalent of a drum solo where Hahn gets to show off both her technical skill and her compositional mind in an improvised section to bridge the 3rd and 4th movements.
