Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D minor op. 40 is the work of a young composer – its author was barely 28 then. Yet it can hardly be called an early piece, since the Russian composer completed his brilliant First Symphony as a 19-year-old, and one of his most significant masterpieces, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District – at the tender age of 26. The date of his Sonata in D minor (1934) coincides with the premiere of the above-mentioned opera; its naturalism and radicalism caused some of Shostakovich’s greatest problems with Soviet authorities. The years 1934-37 were a period of dynamic change and of a quest for a new language in the composer’s oeuvre. This was not an evolution: the pieces written at that time are very different in style, evidencing a frantic search for new identity in the difficult reality of the time.
Cello Sonata is a very early symptom of the rejection of the futurist intensity of the composer’s early works. This rejection was to lead him to a more moderate style relating directly to the Classic-Romantic heritage that will strongly determine Shostakovich's post-1936 works, above all Symphony No. 5. Yet this return to tradition cannot be interpreted as a conformist’s gesture of denying his earlier ideas: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and especially Mussorgsky and Mahler were always the foundation of the composer’s spiritual universe.
In fact, soon after the completion of Cello Sonata, the composer once again turned to the most radical means in his uncompromising Fourth Symphony – a work that did not have its premiere in those times.
Sonata in D minor was written for Victor Kubatsky, the excellent concertmaster of the cello section of Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre and the founder of the Stradivarius Quartet, Shostakovich frequent duet partner in that period.
Its expression is determined by the composer’s typical conflict between deep and meditative lyricism, with a multitude of hidden codes and meanings, and piquant grotesque, full of dazzling sound effects.
• Movement One, Allegro non troppo, is a sonata allegro in which both the main theme introduced in the cello and the subsidiary theme initiated by the piano are lyrical in character. Also significant is a short and agitated bass motif in the piano, appearing towards the end of the exposition and dramatising the later course of the work. In the recapitulation, themes come in an inverted order, and the main theme serves as a basis for an almost mystical Largo.
• The concise Movement Two (Allegro) is a frenzied and reckless scherzo, with Jewish motives, so frequent in Shostakovich. The expansive and virtuoso course of musical narration is twice interrupted by a trio with characteristic flageolet passages of the cello.
• Movement Three is a meditative, two-theme Largo, with an expression presaging the first movement of the later Sixth Symphony.
• The "indomitable” Allegro in the finale is a temperamental rondo based on a very Prokofievan theme. Its irony, spiciness and instrumental virtuosity (the spectacular octave perpetuum mobile of the piano) impart on this highly whimsical music its unique colour.

Marcin Gmys