Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102, by Dmitri Shostakovich was composed in 1957 for his son Maxim's 19th birthday. Maxim premiered the piece during his graduation at the Moscow Conservatory. This piano concerto was intended to be the last piece he wrote for piano. It contains many similar elements to his other composition, Concertino for Two Pianos. They were both written to be accessible for developing young pianists. It is an uncharacteristically cheerful piece, much more so than most of Shostakovich's works.
Instrumentation
The work is scored for solo piano, three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, timpani, snare drum and strings.
Movements
The concerto lasts around 20 minutes and has three movements, with the second movement played attacca, thereby moving directly into the third :
Reception
This concerto is sometimes dismissed as one of the composer's less important works, especially in comparison to some of the symphonies and string quartets. In a letter to Edison Denisov in mid-February 1957, barely a week after he had finished work on it, the composer himself wrote that the work had "no redeeming artistic merits". It has been suggested that Shostakovich wanted to preempt criticism by deprecating the work himself, and that the comment was actually meant to be tongue-in-cheek. In April of 1957, he and his son performed a two piano arrangement of the work for the Ministry of Culture, and then it was later premiered for the public at the Moscow Conservatory. Despite the apparently simplistic nature of this concerto, the public has always regarded it warmly, and it stands as one of Shostakovich's most popular pieces. In 2017, the concerto was voted 19th in the Classic FM Hall of Fame.
Recordings
Despite his dismissal of the concerto, the composer performed it himself on a number of occasions, and recorded it along with his first concerto. Both are played at fast tempo rarely matched in modern recordings. On the third recording, one can hear some of the passages played by Shostakovich were not as clean and it was a sign of his deteriorating hand. In his recordings of the second movement, Shostakovich presents slight variations in some passages that are not written in the score. Some examples include a repeated chord Shostakovich plays from bar 33 that is from the first beat of bar 34 is written as a tie in the score. Maxim's own son, Dmitri Maximovich Shostakovich, has also recorded the piece, with his father conducting I Musici de Montreal. Identical in bearing to his famous grandfather, Dmitri the younger also matches his grandfather's frenetic speed and expression very closely. Other recordings include those by Leonard Bernstein as soloist and conductor for Columbia Records, Marc-André Hamelin for Hyperion Records, and Dmitri Alexeev with Jerzy Maksymiuk conducting the English Chamber Orchestra. There has been a recording of this concerto by the Mariinsky Orchestra with soloist, Denis Matsuev and Valery Gergiev as conductor. In Fantasia 2000, Yefim Bronfman plays the concerto's first movement as the story teller of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" by Hans Christian Andersen. Bronfman has also recorded both of the concertos with the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
