Piano Concerto no. 3

Khrennikov wrote his Third Piano Concerto in 1983 and, as with the earlier two, played the solo part himself; he had trained as a pianist at the Moscow Conservatoire before composition took over. The concerto is compact, tonal and openly melodic, written in an idiom he had defended for decades from a position no other Soviet composer occupied: from 1948 until 1991 he headed the Union of Soviet Composers, the body that had denounced Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the year he took charge. His own music stayed deliberately clear of everything that denunciation had targeted.