On June 21, 1933 Tikhon Khrennikov made his debut as a composer and as a pianist. By his own admission he was "terribly excited" as his concerto contained passages with virtuoso-c1ass technical difficulties for the performer. Khrennikov managed to overcome his pre-concert excitement and played his first composition dedicated to his teacher Vissarion Shebalin with great inspiration. However, his debut did not make much of an impact beyond the rather limited circ1e of the Conservatory's faculty and students. Among those who assessed his first concerto for its true worth was Nikolai Anosov who conducted the orchestra on that occasion. Anosov was a most discerning judge of music with a flair for new ideas.
Shortly afterwards Anosov invited Khrennikov to join him on a concert tour in the city of Voronezh. There Khrennikov's composition was well received. In February 1934 Anosov played the concerto in Moscow on a program that also featured Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony, fragments from U. Yatsevich's Symphony and Shostakovich's Hamlet Suite.
Later Khrennikov added a finale to his piano concerto. Interest in it among the conductors continued to grow. Noted conductors such as K. Saradjev, A. Melik-Pashayev and Georg Sebastian included it in their programs. It was broadcast on the radio several times. In those days "live" studio broadcasts were an important vehicle for popularizing new musical compositions as they turned the public spotlight on them.
Two performances of the concerto in 1935 decided its subsequent fortunes. On May 18 Khrennikov played it in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. On that occasion he was supported by the All Union Radio Symphony Orchestra under Georg Sebastian. In a rather ecstatic review A. Groman, the music critic of Vechernyaya Moskva (Moscow Evening Standard), wrote: "The most interesting of the compositions performed that evening was Khrennikov's piano concerto brilliantly played by the composer himself. Its appeal derives chiefly from its youthful energy and cheerfulness coupled with brilliant piano phrasing. The noted musicologist K. Kuznetsov in a brief referenee to the symphony by K. Makarov-Rakitin which was also performed on that program, emphasizes, 'Khrennikov, a pupil of Professor Shebalin, follows a totally different stylistic line. Someone seated beside me whispered: "Here is the Moscow Shostakovich' for you!" Indeed, Khrennikov has much in common with Shostakovich: the same urbanistic style, unlike that of Makarov-Rakitin and many other Moscow composers, whose output seems to have a strong rustic flavor being based on the themes and rhythms of folk music.
Like Shostakovich, Khrennikov is both witty and observant leaning towards musical expressionism and paradoxes. This is not to say that Khrennikov is in any sense under Shostakovich's influence. The two merely move in the same direction. The piano concerto is an excellent composition, both inspired and elegant, with an uncommon original piano style which is perhaps less effective in the orchestral accompaniment. What can be better than the composer himself playing the piano part with eclat! Georg Sebastian, the conductor, and each member of the orchestra, to speak nothing of the audience, were fired with a good deal of enthusiasm.
The concerto was included in the program of the Second International Festival of Arts in Leningrad. The Festival, a landmark event in Soviet cultural life, attracted the attention of many foreign musicians, music critics and ordinary music lovers. Among the festival's guests of honor were the outstanding pianist Leopold Godovsky; the Czech historian, musicologist and public figure, Zdenek Nejedly; Secretary ofthe International Theatrical Society, Paul Gzell; Director of the Warsaw Conservatory, E. Morawski, to name but - a few prominent personalities. Interest focused on Meyerhold's sensational production of Tchaikovsky's classic The Queen of Spades, as wen as on the superlative performances by V. Barsova, David Oistrakh, Melik-Pashayev and Eugene Mravinsky.
One of the highlights ofthe Leningrad Festival was the inaugural evening whose program, apart from classical staples by Glinka and Tchaikovsky, also included Khrennikov's First Piano Concerto, played by the composer. Khrennikov scored a triumphal success and had to play several encores. A Moscow Daily News correspondent who covered the Festival wrote that the majority of the audience agreed that the composition of the youngest of the composers was the high point of the evening. The audience were particularly struck by the depth and maturity of the concerto's concept remarkable for a twenty-year-old composer.
Text from the book "Khrennikov: His Life and Times" by L. Grigoryev and Y. Platek (Paganiniana Publications Inc.)