Shostakovich Cycle: 2. Afternoon Concert

A secret language

The desk drawer that hides what cannot be spoken is a familiar place in any dictatorship where speaking truth to power was a death sentence. The D major 4th starts innocently but gradually darkens as it moves past the sorrow of the times into the increasingly subversive last movements, bursting into unmistakable anguish and fury in the terrifying Finale. Like the 4th the 5th, not heard in public until the brief Thaw following Stalin’s death, was composed in the aftermath of his great solo piano homage to Bach and, unusually, achieves moments of radiant peace.