Lockdown Listening #4 - Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No. 2

Hello again! This week we’re looking at a piano concerto. A concerto is a piece with a solo instrument that takes the spotlight for most of the time, accompanied by an orchestra. This is a piano concerto, so there’s a solo pianist playing and interacting with the orchestra. It’s a really great piece and I hope you enjoy listening to it! The video below is pretty exciting, because the recording is actually of the composer playing the solo piano part.

Bronze

1. How many separate movements (sections) can you hear? What makes them different (apart from the gap in between)?

2. What would you say the mood of the first movement is?

3. Does the piano always sound like the most important instrument, or are there moments when it isn’t?

4. Which other instruments are sometimes just as important as the piano?

5. Try and play your instrument like a soloist playing a concerto - either use a piece you are already learning, or improvise something! The idea is to stand out from all the other instruments that might be playing.

   Silver

   1. Why might it be useful to hear the composer playing his own concerto?

   2. Write down any irregular time signatures that you might be able to hear in the third movement. What effect do they have on the music?

   3. A cadenza is a section in a concerto where the soloist plays a particularly impressive passage without the orchestral accompaniment. This can either be as written by a composer, or others sometimes write their own cadenzas. Find a cadenza in this piece and make a list of a few of the ways it develops the main melody from the movement it’s in and how it shows them off.

   4. ‘Concertos are serious pieces of music’ - based on your own knowledge and this piece, how far do you agree, and why?

   5. Do some research about the origins of this piece. Who was it written for? When? Does it fit with Shostakovich’s usual style?

   Gold

   1. ‘The second movement is out of place in an otherwise more energetic concerto’ - how far do you agree with this statement?

   2. Write a short cadenza-style passage for your instrument which develops a simple tune that you already know about/can play.

   3. Find 5 examples of musical sarcasm in the first movement, and 5 in the third.

   4. Why might concertos be especially difficult to compose? Think of 3 reasons and flesh them out as paragraphs, thinking through the processes a composer might have to go through.

   5. To what extent do you think this piece fits with the era it was composed in?