Violin Concerto No. 2 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 129

Dmitri Shostakovich composed his No. 2 Violin Concerto in 1967. This is one of Shostakovich's last major orchestral works, written when he was in his early sixties and in declining health. Like many of his late compositions, it is deeply introspective and tinged with a sense of resignation. The Concerto was written for the great Soviet violinist David Oistrakh, who had also premiered the First Violin Concerto (1956). Oistrakh gave the world premiere in May 1967 with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky, the same forces that had premiered so many of Shostakovich's major works.
 
The Concerto was intended as a birthday present for Oistrakh on the occasion of his 60th birthday on September 30, 1967. But the famously absent-minded Shostakovich, who had suffered his first heart attack the preceding year and had been in ill health ever since, was so eager to honour his friend that he jumped the gun by a year: Oistrakh was born in 1908, not 1907. To make up for his embarrassing but well-intentioned mistake, Shostakovich wrote his only violin sonata for Oistrakh the following year. The two men had been close for decades. Shostakovich had known and adored Oistrakh since 1935, when they toured Turkey together as part of an official Soviet musical delegation. Over the years they had become fast friends and frequent musical collaborators, taking refuge in their intense shared artistic passion through the horrors of World War II and Stalinist repression. 
 
By 1967, years of tobacco, alcohol, and state-sponsored terror had taken a toll on Shostakovich. He had suffered his first heart attack the year before, the night after his final public performance as a pianist. In April 1967, he confided to his friend Isaac Glikman: "Very slowly, with difficulty, squeezing it out note by note, I am writing a Violin Concerto." Despite this, the work was completed on May 18, 1967, at Shostakovich's dacha in Repino. The creative breakthrough that made the Concerto possible had an unlikely catalyst. He broke his compositional silence with a set of songs on poems by Alexander Blok in February 1967, attributing his breakthrough to a shot of forbidden brandy he snuck while his wife was out of the house. His spirits revived, and the concerto followed soon after. 
 
Oistrakh was soloist in the unofficial premiere in Bolshevo, near Moscow, on September 13, 1967, and in the official premiere on September 26 in Moscow, both with the Moscow Philharmonic conducted by Kirill Kondrashin. Two months after the Moscow premiere, Oistrakh and Eugene Ormandy gave the first performance in Western Europe — and the composer was in the hospital again. 
 
By 1967, Stalin had long been dead and the atmosphere in Soviet music had become considerably more free, but still confining. Shostakovich had become more adventurous in his musical language, as in his Thirteenth Symphony ("Babi Yar," 1962), set to texts by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, including a highly controversial poem about the massacre of Ukrainian Jews by the Nazis. But Soviet officials, including Premier Khrushchev, decided he had gone too far and demanded changes, leaving Shostakovich disillusioned and depressed. The Second Concerto is part of Shostakovich's quasi-private late style. Where the First Violin Concerto is fierce, passionate, grandly suffering, aggressively humorous, and hugely virtuosic, in every way in-your-face, the Second Concerto is inward and wry. 
 
The Second Concerto is often compared unfavourably, and somewhat unfairly, to the more overtly dramatic First. But its qualities are different rather than lesser. Its spare, lean orchestration meant that the orchestra often recedes, leaving the violin exposed. The late-Shostakovich language indicated an austere, economical, deeply personal composition with dark lyricism; no flashy virtuosity for its own sake. This Concerto had strong ties to his late string quartets, particularly the 13th and 14th.
 
The Concerto is in three movements:
Moderato:  The key of C-sharp minor is a difficult one for the violin. It sits awkwardly against the instrument's open strings, a deliberate choice that gives the solo line a sense of resistance and strain from the very opening. The choice may be intended to recall Beethoven's Op. 131 String Quartet, Mahler's Fifth Symphony, or Prokofiev's Symphony No. 7, a work Shostakovich particularly admired. 
 
The first movement is in sonata form and concludes with a contrapuntal cadenza. Both violin concertos begin identically, giving the initial melodic idea to cellos and double basses in octaves alone, almost as a kind of linking code between the two works. From this spare, low foundation the solo violin enters with a ruminative, long-breathed melody. The texture throughout is lean, Shostakovich strips the orchestra back rather than deploying it in any grand romantic sense, leaving the violin frequently exposed.

​A second theme arrives at roughly double the tempo, the violin duetting with woodwinds. Always with some drumming, on strings, never on drums, in the background. This inner restlessness beneath the melodic surface is characteristic of the whole concerto: nothing is ever quite at peace. Rather than the extrovert showpiece cadenza of the First Concerto, the cadenza here is contrapuntal, the violin essentially arguing with itself in multiple voices simultaneously. It is technically formidable but expressively inward, a meditation rather than a display. The nature of each concerto rarely permits a lightening of tension. The movement ends not in triumph but in quiet, unresolved reflection.
 
Adagio : The Adagio is in three parts, with a central accompanied cadenza. The slow second movement begins with an unadorned melody for violin, reminiscent of Baroque music in its austerity. This is arguably the emotional heart of the entire concerto, a long, singing line of almost unbearable restraint, where Shostakovich says the most by holding back the most.
 
One of the most striking features of this movement and the concerto overall is the role of the horn. The horn frequently acts as a second, shadow soloist, playing melodic material at significant moments. The horn has a darker, more opaque tone than the violin and seems to follow the soloist like a heavy conscience, a shadow self; some commentators have read this as Shostakovich himself standing beside the portrait of Oistrakh. The flute introduces a complementary idea which is developed until the austere opening theme returns in the cellos and basses, initiating an intense crescendo. This passage arrives at a contrasting middle section, which begins with a fragile melody for the violin. 
 
The middle section ends with a tense, cadenza-like passage for the violin and timpani. The combination is stark and arresting, the soloist and the most primal percussion instrument locked together, with no harmonic cushioning from the orchestra. After the orchestra re-enters with tense tremolo strings, a varied reprise of the opening section follows, ending with the main melody as a horn solo which crescendos to a warm, glowing conclusion. It is one of the very few moments of warmth in the entire work, and it feels hard-won.
 
Allegro: The third movement is unusual in beginning with its own slow introduction, marked Adagio, before shifting into the Allegro proper. The Adagio goes straight into the finale via a solo from the violin, who soon gets into an argument with some rather aggressive-sounding muted horns. The soloist seems to sidestep this confrontation with the main theme of the movement, a nervous fiddle-tune punctuated by grotesque shouts from high and low woodwinds.
 
The Allegro is built on a passacaglia, a repeating bass line over which variations are constructed, a form Shostakovich used throughout his career, most memorably in the Eighth Symphony. This gives the finale an inevitability, even a fatalism: the bass keeps turning, regardless of what the violin does above it. A fragment of an Odessa Jewish street vendor's song ("Kupite bublichki!" "Come buy my bagels!") appears before the first cadenza and recurs briefly in the finale, evoking folk fiddling styles and honouring Oistrakh's Ukrainian-Jewish roots from that city. It is a wry, affectionate gesture, almost a private joke between friends, but it also carries the bittersweet quality typical of Shostakovich's use of Jewish idiom: the melody is playful in surface, sorrowful beneath. 
 
The movement builds to a substantial solo cadenza, the concerto's largest technical demand on the soloist. After this, the orchestra re-enters and drives toward the close. But this is not a triumphant finale in the conventional sense. The Second Concerto is inward and wry. Its composition was shadowed by illness. The ending carries ambiguity, energy, yes, but the shadows of the earlier movements are never fully dispelled. It resolves, but does not reassure.
 
The Concerto has never quite achieved the popularity of the First Concerto, but is highly regarded among musicians and serious listeners. Some performers, including Oistrakh himself, considered it the more profound of the two.
 
References
Matthew-Walker, R. (2020). Violin Concerto No. 2 in C Sharp Minor, Op 129. Hyperion.
 
Steinberg, M. (2018, February). Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 2. San Francisco Symphony. 
 
(2026, April 17). Violin Concerto No. 2 (Shostakovich). In Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_No._2_(Shostakovich)
 
(2026). Shostakovich – Violin Concerto No. 2. Boston Symphony Orchestra. https://www.bso.org/works/violin-concerto-no-2-shostakovich
 
(2020, January 10). Stark Beauty: Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Houston Symphony. https://houstonsymphony.org/shostakovich-violin-concerto-2/
 
(2026). Violin Concerto No. 2 (Shostakovich). Grokipedia. https://grokipedia.com/page/violin_concerto_no_2_shostakovich