Violin Concerto No. 1

Dmitri Shostakovich

The First Violin Concerto by Shostakovich is an unforgettable journey. It’s a complex masterpiece – brilliantly constructed, emotionally vast, and always life-changing, whether you’re listening to or performing it. After careful preparation and alignment of views, the performance becomes a step into the unknown – a world where I want to stay open, aware, vulnerable, and ready for the miracles that sometimes happen on stage. I performed this piece with Maestro Kazushi Ono in Tokyo in 2025, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with such a deep and inspiring musician. I’m very much looking forward to our work together with the Brussels Philharmonic.

Each movement is full of imagination and emotional nuance. The first movement is like waking up disoriented, trying to see through fog, through time itself. The second is wild and sharp, full of rebellious, Dionysian energy that keeps everyone on edge. The third movement – structured as variations on a passacaglia theme – is heartbreakingly sincere and beautifully orchestrated, exploring the expressive range of the orchestra to its limits. The cadenza that follows is the ultimate expressive peak, a culmination of dreams, loneliness, ideals, victories, and defeats. It is physically and mentally exhausting – as it is meant to be!

The finale bursts in with ecstatic, over-the-top joy, like a mad folk celebration, a breathless dance. Legend has it that David Oistrakh, who worked closely with Shostakovich and gave the concerto its premiere, asked the composer to insert a short break before the final movement, because after the cadenza, the soloist has nothing left to give. Shostakovich added some lines of rest for the violin, but the Finale bursts forth anyway – exuberant and unstoppable.

My professor, Eduard Grach, studied with David Oistrakh for a few years. He emphasized the importance of being alert, expressive, and sincere in this concerto. Its emotional weight is the core of the interpretation we worked on together. There is a necessity to express something greater than one can understand; something almost metaphysical. That general direction came rather naturally to me. Some music speaks to you immediately, and with this concerto, I always felt I understood its emotional truth, even though it takes a lifetime to fully grasp all the historical dimensions.

There is also a facet of this piece which holds deep resonance, especially in our unsettled times. It was written in silence, under oppression, and reflects a reality where truth had to be masked, or whispered in musical language only those who understood could decode. Shostakovich was a very sensitive and anxious person. He lived in constant fear of denunciation or disappearance. You can feel that tension and inner contradiction in every bar of this concerto – it is music written by someone who had to live a double life, always making the most meaningful and deep observations about the world, but rarely allowed to speak freely within it. His music often expresses things that couldn’t be said aloud – it speaks of fear, solitude, defiance, often bitter irony, but also dreams and ideals.

Alena Baeva