Sonata No. 2 op. 81

Myaskovsky’s Second Cello Sonata was written in 1948 shortly after in direct response to the famous Resolution on Music issued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and leveled specifically at Miaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian. The issue was "formalism;' which Soviet musical dictionaries define as "the artificial separation of form from content to the detriment of content. This boils down to a matter of elitist complexity vs. democratic accessibility.

One is hard pressed to understand the extreme simplification of style that took place in the late forties not only in Miaskovsky's music but also in that of the other composers who had come under fire. The piece that got Miaskovsky out of trouble was the present sonata. It is of a studied simplicity indeed, and a no less studied return to the traditional values of Russian music, as the Party defined them. There are folk-like themes, modeled in the first movement on modal peasant songs, and in the last on the typical moto perpetuo of instrumental dance tunes. There is also diatonic purity of harmony.