Piano Concerto in D-flat, Opus 38
Composition and premiere: Aram Khachaturian began his Piano Concerto in spring 1936 and completed it that November. The premiere took place outdoors in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, July 12, 1937, Lev Oborin performing as piano soloist with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Lev Steinberg. Previous BSO performances: The concerto entered the Boston Pops repertoire in July 1942 with soloist Bernhard Weiser under Arthur Fielder’s direction; Serge Koussevitzky led the first of his many BSO performances with soloist William Kapell in October 1943 and later recorded it commercially. First Tanglewood performance: August 16, 2008, BSO, soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, André Previn conducting.
During World War II, in that brief moment when the U.S. and USSR were allies, BSO music director Serge Koussevitzky programmed many works by Soviet composers as a symbol of American solidarity with the struggle against fascism. Although he had left his native Russia many years before, Koussevitzky still maintained close contacts with musical life there, and even headed the Musical Commission of the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship. Not surprisingly, there were many performances of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, including the American concert premiere in 1942 of the celebrated Seventh Symphony, Leningrad, by the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra at Tanglewood. The works of Koussevitzky’s old friend Sergei Prokofiev, who had returned to live in the USSR in 1936, featured prominently, too, among them the 1945 American premiere of his epic Symphony No. 5.
Koussevitzky also introduced audiences to the music of Aram Khachaturian, the “third man” of Soviet music, virtually unknown in America at the time. But soon after its 1943 debut with soloist William Kapell, Khachaturian’s dynamic, exotic, and virtuosic Piano Concerto, Opus 38, made the composer famous, and became one of the most popular items in the BSO repertoire, receiving 10 performances over the next three seasons.
One of the witnesses of this phenomenal success was 33-year-old American composer Samuel Barber, whose Commando March shared the program with the Concerto. At a rehearsal, Barber later recalled, “Koussevitzky said to me with that special smile of intrigue he would save only for the most important events: ‘Now you will hear something very special, my dear.’ He was right.” For the next few years, the concerto became a “jukebox favorite” and the signature piece of “Khachaturian Kapell,” demanded by audiences wherever the pianist appeared. The recording Kapell made with Koussevitzky and the BSO in 1946 became a bestseller. (Sadly, Kapell’s very promising career was cut short when he died in a plane crash in 1953 at the age of 31.)
Khachaturian was still a graduate student at Moscow Conservatory when he finished the Piano Concerto in 1936. Born into a working-class Armenian family in the large Armenian community of Tiflis (now Tbilisi), capital city of the Caucasus nation of Georgia, Khachaturian was exposed growing up to a rich variety of Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani folk music and culture. He showed exceptional musical talent as a child and moved to Moscow in 1921 to study first at the Gnessin Institute and later at the Moscow Conservatory, where his primary mentor was the legendary pedagogue and composer Nikolai Miaskovsky. Sergei Prokofiev, newly arrived from France, was another important influence, and gave Khachaturian advice as he was composing the concerto.
Himself an accomplished pianist, Khachaturian wrote a significant body of work for the instrument. His driving, energetic, dance-like early Toccata (1932), first performed by his classmate Lev Oborin, his favorite interpreter, immediately became popular with pianists. From the beginning of his composing career, Khachaturian made extensive use of Armenian folk music and its unique stylistic features. These include driving rhythms in abruptly changing patterns and meters; use of the dissonant interval of the second; a static bass or pedal point; and an improvisational quality. Because of his proletarian origins, non-Russian ethnic origins and Soviet training, Khachaturian eventually became a powerful symbol within the Soviet musical establishment and abroad of the ideal of a multinational Soviet cultural identity. Khachaturian called the Piano Concerto the “first national concerto for piano,” and hoped it would be a model for other Soviet composers.
At the same time, Khachaturian was well-trained in the Western classical tradition, which he successfully fused with the “national” element. Among the composers he admired were Borodin (whose father was Georgian), Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev, but he found the modernism of Stravinsky and Schoenberg completely alien. One hears an echo of Rachmaninoff in the dramatic opening—and insistently repeated—three-note motif F-A-A-flat (with the A written as B-double-flat), which reappears in the finale as a unifying element. Prokofiev’s influence seems strongest in the toccata-like third movement, with its “dry” pianistic style and fleeting sixteenth-note patterns.
A short, splashy fanfare opens the first movement, establishing a pronounced semitone dissonance that gives the concerto its special “Eastern” quality throughout. Presented in relatively conventional sonata form, an emphatic and percussive first theme contrasts sharply with a plaintive second theme set in a rhythmic pulse common in Armenian folk music. After development and recapitulation, the movement accelerates towards a spectacular climax in an extended virtuosic cadenza based on both themes.
Audiences and critics have especially loved the second movement, set in ternary form around a seductive well-known Transcaucasian folk tune Khachaturian had heard in Tbilisi. It spins out in a series of inventive variations, its most unusual feature being the use, in a brief passage of a flexatone, a percussion instrument invented in 1922. Imitating the eerie and “Eastern” sound of a musical saw, the flexatone has a narrow sheet of flexible metal that when shaken is struck by wooden balls hung on either side.
The least obviously “national” movement of the Concerto, the finale chases from C-major to the tonic of D-flat major, in a dance-like pattern in rapid sixteenth-note runs, with the strings providing a steady beat underneath. (Just a few years later, Khachaturian would write his first ballet, Happiness.) After a long, rhapsodic and rather introspective cadenza, the Concerto closes dramatically with the thundering return of the first movement’s main theme.
HARLOW ROBINSON
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. He has contributed essays and reviews to the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Symphony, Musical America, and Opera News, and program essays to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival, and Metropolitan Opera.
