Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 / Two Scherzos

For the fifth part of his Dmitri Shostakovich symphony cycle, John Storgård turns to some of the composer's earliest orchestral works. The orchestral scherzo was a popular assignment for composition teachers at the time: its relatively simple form nevertheless requires the student to create highly contrasting material for the outer and middle sections and to design effective transitions. It is no surprise that this form plays a major role in Shostakovich's early works, as well as in the works of Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and many others. The two examples included here demonstrate the young composer's skill and style, although not yet his fully distinctive compositional voice. Both works, however, show connections to his later First Symphony, which was composed as his final examination in composition at the Petrograd Conservatory. Shostakovich worked on it for two years, and the symphony that finally emerged was an immediate success and made him a child prodigy among Soviet composers. The Third Symphony, composed four years later, bears witness not only to Shostakovich's rapid development as a composer but also to the equally rapid changes in the world in which he lived. In December 1926, he passed the newly introduced examination in Marxist ideology and was able to extend his admission as a doctoral student at the Leningrad Conservatory until early 1930. He submitted the symphony with the explanation that it expressed "the festive mood of peaceful construction." During this early phase of Stalin's first five-year plan, it was already clear that he had realized that political propaganda would be crucial to his creative survival.