Shostakovich – Weinberg – Jolivet: Music with a taut inner structure and logical consistency.
The sensational trumpeter Selina Ott and the renowned pianist Maria Radutu, who both were nominated for the Opus Klassik 2021 price, team up with Dirk Kaftan who conducts the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in three works by Dmitri Shostakovich, André Jolivet and Mieczysław Weinberg.
The outer movements of the Shostakovich Concerto, full of fun, satire, sparkle, virtuosity and musical quotes from olden times shine for me like the protective embrace around one of the emotionally most sincere slow movements of the piano concertos literature. (Maria Radutu)
Shostakovich’s Concerto for piano, trumpet and string orchestra (1933) is notable for a prevailing parodistic tone, which features in hardly any of his other works. Many of the themes that lend the music a distorted, grotesque face are assigned to the trumpet.
Although the instrumentation for André Jolivet’s Concertino (trumpet, strings and piano) is exactly the same as that for the Shostakovich, the latter is more of a piano concerto, while Jolivet’s is more of a trumpet concerto.
Like Shostakovich, Mieczysław Weinberg also incorporates several quotations into the final movement of his Trumpet Concerto (1967) – the fanfare from Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, for example. Referred to by Shostakovich as ‘a symphony for trumpet and orchestra’, the work presents music with a taut inner structure and logical consistency.