During Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, from 1928, music came from under the strait-jacket of the Association of Proletarian Musicians. Though the Association’s edicts were shortlived, their impact on the young Shostakovich was incalculable. While the demands of staying alive obliged him to present a publicly acceptable face as a composer of music for film and theatre, his real creative energies were directed towards writing music which he could play at home and within a select circle. The greatest of these works is the cycle of Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 34 – composed during the winter months of 1932–33 – which look forward to the Op. 87 Preludes and Fugues and to the great chamber works which represent the private side of Shostakovich’s music.

Shostakovich composed two concertos for the violin, one not long after the end of the Second World War and the other in the 1960s, but despite his long friendship with David Oistrakh, he composed no sonata for the instrument until the Violin Sonata in D major. It came immediately after the Twelfth String Quartet (1968) and before the Fourteenth Symphony (1969) and was written in honour of David Oistrakh’s sixtieth birthday. The Sonata is as distinctive in personality as all Shostakovich’s later music and has much of its austerity.