Lev Knipper - Violin Concerto No. 1 (1943)

Lev Konstantinovich Knipper (Russian: Лев Константи́нович Кни́ппер; 3 December [O.S. 21 November] 1898 – 30 July 1974) was a Soviet and Russian composer.

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Violin Concerto No. 1 (1943)
Dedication: Olga Knipper-Chekhova (1868-1959)

I. Largo - Allegro (0:00)
II. Andantino (18:14)
III. Allegro energico (26:18)

Mikhail Krutik, violin and the St. Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Titov

Lev Knipper was born in Tiflis to railway engineer Konstantin Leonardovich Knipper and Elena-Luiza Yulyevna Rid. Shortly after his birth, the family relocated to Tsarskoye Selo, then to Yekaterinoslav in 1910, and then Saint Petersburg in 1913. He was greatly influenced by his father's sister, the actress Olga Knipper (wife of the playwright Anton Chekhov), who encouraged his musical interests. He learned to play clarinet, double bass, various brass instruments, and taught himself to play piano.

Knipper enlisted in the White Army in 1916. Following the Russian Civil War of 1917, he became stranded in Turkey, though was eventually able to reunite with his aunt Olga, who was touring abroad. Upon his return to the RSFSR in 1922, he was repeatedly interviewed and ultimately recruited by the OGPU foreign department. At their behest, Knipper travelled to Germany in 1922–23, where he made the acquaintance of composers Alois Hába, Philipp Jarnach, and Paul Hindemith. Hindemith's music in particular had a strong influence on Knipper's own compositional language.

Seemingly in response to criticism of his modernist early works, Knipper resigned his post as technical secretary to the ACM and abruptly shifted his style towards one more in line with the principles of socialist realism. In 1930–1931, he travelled to Central Asia to study the region's folk music. He was particularly drawn to Tajik music, which directly influenced eight of his works.  The majority of Knipper's works from this period are musically conservative, and patriotic and militaristic in tone, most notably his "song-symphonies" (3, 4 and 6). The most prominent of these is his Fourth Symphony, "Poem of the Komsomol Fighter", Op. 41 (1934); with lyrics by Viktor Gusev and dedicated to Kliment Voroshilov. The central theme of the symphony, the song Polyushko-polye, has become Knipper's most famous work as one of the marching songs in the repertoire of the Alexandrov Ensemble. Though in line with Soviet political ideals, these song-symphonies were met with criticism by some of Knipper's fellow composers. Dmitri Shostakovich lambasted Knipper's Third Symphony (1932) for its "primitiveness" at a meeting of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1935. Dmitry Kabalevsky pointed out the shortcomings of Knipper's approach to combining mass-songs and the surrounding symphonic material. In his Sixth Symphony, Op. 47 (1936), Knipper apparently veered too close to his earlier style and was publicly rebuked for it; his Seventh Symphony "Military" (1938) returned to an ideologically safer style.

Knipper continued to compose during the Great Patriotic War, though much of his time was devoted to extensive travel for the NKVD, which he continued to serve until 1949. According to secret intelligence documents released in 2002, Knipper and his wife were to play a key role if the Nazis should capture Moscow. Under the plan, ballerinas and circus acrobats were to be armed with grenades and pistols in order to assassinate German generals if they attempted to organize concerts and other celebrations in the event of the city's capture. Knipper was personally charged with the responsibility of killing Adolf Hitler; an opportunity the NKVD suspected might arise due to Knipper's sister, Olga, having social connections with high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring.

Lev's sister Olga Konstantinovna Chekhova (née Knipper; Russian: Ольга Константиновна Чехова; 14 April 1897 – 9 March 1980), known in Germany as Olga Tschechowa, was a Russian German actress. Her film roles include the female lead in Alfred Hitchcock's Mary (1931). Her first cinema role in Germany was in F. W. Murnau silent movie Schloß Vogelöd (1921). In the 1930s, she rose to become one of the brightest stars of the Third Reich and was admired by Adolf Hitler.
A published photograph of her sitting beside Hitler at a reception gave the leaders of the Soviet intelligence service the impression that she had close contacts with Hitler. She had more contact with the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who referred to her in his diaries as "eine charmante Frau" ("a charming lady").

She is also rumored to have been a communist spy in a Soviet conspiracy. According to the book Killing Hitler (2006) by the British author Roger Moorhouse, she was pressured by Stalin and Beria to flirt with Adolf Hitler in order to gain and transfer information so that Hitler could be killed by secret Soviet agents.