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The Gaggle Music Club: Aram Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in D minor

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Aram Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in D minor. Composed in 1940, the work is one of the major violin concertos of the 20th century and constitutes an important moment within Soviet musical history.

Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978) was a Soviet composer of Armenian ancestry who was one of the leading musical figures of the USSR. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, into an Armenian family, he initially studied science but switched to music in the 1920s when he moved to Moscow. There, he studied at the Gnessin Institute and later at the Moscow Conservatory.

Khachaturian became a central figure in Soviet music, much admired for his colorful orchestration, use of folk rhythms and accessibility. Along with Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, he was part of the Soviet "big three," though his style was generally more tuneful and extroverted than that of the other two.

The Violin Concerto in D minor premiered in Moscow on Nov. 16, 1940. David Oistrakh, to whom the concerto was dedicated, was the soloist. Oistrakh had earlier premiered Prokofiev’s first violin concerto. Armenian and Georgian folk music saturate the concerto in melody and rhythm. Khachaturian composed the piece during a summer vacation in the Caucasus.

The concerto is in three movements:

I. Allegro con fermezza: The mood is exuberant and full of rhythmic drive. It opens with a bold orchestral statement, followed by a vigorous, folk-like theme for the soloist.

II. Andante sostenuto: The mood is lyrical and melancholic. It opens with a brooding theme in the orchestra, before the violin enters with a soaring, deeply expressive melody evoking Armenian laments.

III. Allegro vivace: The mood is exuberant, dance-like, extroverted, filled with folk dance rhythms and asymmetrical meters. The piece ends in a brilliant and dazzling coda.

Khachaturian's Violin Concerto is one of his most successful and enduring concert works, alongside his Piano Concerto (1936) and Cello Concerto (1946). While the piano concerto is more experimental in harmony and orchestration, the Violin Concerto is more mature in its integration of folk style with classical form.

The work represents the peak of his pre-war orchestral output and confirms his talent for synthesizing national color with concert virtuosity. It reflected the Soviet ideal of national music: accessible, folk-based, optimistic and technically impressive. Along with the concertos by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Bartók, it is as a major mid-20th century contribution to the violin concerto genre. It also offered a distinctively non-Western voice, showcasing Armenian and Caucasian idioms for an international audience.

Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in D minor is a vibrant, colorful and emotionally rich work that distills Armenian folk idioms into a Romantic-classical concerto form. It is one of the composer’s masterpieces, and a milestone in the music of the Soviet era. It is a favorite with audiences on account of its virtuosity and exotic flair—and it confirms Khachaturian’s status as a major 20th century composer.

In this performance from May 2016, the soloist is Eva Šulić, and Tomislav Fačini conducts the Zagreb Philharmonic orchestra.

00:40:58
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More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

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