Recordings: An End to Grotesquerie

The most recent major work of Russia’s foremost composer, Dmitry Shostakovich, is the Violin Concerto No. 2 (1967). Soviet Virtuoso David Oistrakh has already performed it in a few cities in the U.S. and Europe, but most Westerners have not heard it.

Last week the first recording of the concerto was issued on the Melodyia Angel label. The music should prove as much of a surprise to Shostakovich’s fans as to his critics. Gone are the characteristic hard-edged rhythms, brittle orchestral sounds and prankish grotesqueries. Instead, the bad boy of Russian music seems to have found a new mood of lyrical quiet and contentment. His artistic debt to Sergei Prokofiev is as clear as ever—embarrassingly so at times—and some of his melodic writing in the first movement is downright dull. But the elegiac sweep of the middle adagio movement and the jauntiness of the finale compensate admirably for these shortcomings. The concerto is not quite a masterpiece, but Oistrakh and the Moscow Philharmonic under Conductor Kiril Kondrashin perform it as though it were.