★★★★☆
The second cello concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich has never matched the first in public appeal or soloist appreciation. Premiered on the composer’s sixtieth birthday, at a concert where he was proclaimed a Hero of Socialist Labour, the concerto is ambivalent both in meaning and in its balance between soloist and orchestra. There are stretches where the cello is left to find its own way home as a huge orchestra sits idly by. Quite possibly a metaphor for Socialist Labour.
Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom the work was written, made a hash of its first recording and the work has, to some extent, never recovered. Every page demands the soloist’s commitment, but to what? There are back-references to the highly successful first concerto and periodic insertions of the composer’s Germanic initials, DSCH, as if to say, this is about me, my torments and something I cannot mention.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason surmounts these issues with what can only be described as relish. His love of the music is abundant and his momentum allows the listener to screen out the noises off and just listen to a great composer at the peak of his powers. John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London provide precision accompaniment, holding back as the work turns wistful in its finale and then blazing it out with controlled explosions. I think I now love the concerto more than before.
With his sister Isata Kanneh-Mason, Sheku proceeds to give fresh and lyrical accounts of cello sonatas by Britten and Shostakovich, the first sounding less than commonly buttoned-up and the second sweetly ruminant in a meadow of folkish melodies. If this sounds like anti-climax, it is not. The album is coherent in its component parts and persuasive in its musicianship. All that’s missing is context. These works were conceived in a test-tube of a catastrophic social experiment. Something of that background needs to be heard, if only in a sleeve note.
