SHOSTAKOVICH, D.: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2
Steinbacher, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Nelsons
C687061A

Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Orfeo label is from a recording of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, a work completed in 1948 but premiered only in 1955, a victim of the political-artistic scrutiny imposed by the apparatchiks of the then Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Even with so unpolitical a work Shostakovich could not be careful enough; a violin concerto’s virtuoso form alone would have been difficult to justify to their ears, not least in this finale, in which soloist Arabella Steinbacher plays the ‘Muntz’ Stradivarius made in Cremona in 1736.