This album contains the recording of a painful historic occasion: the USSR State SO, Svetlanov and Rostropovich performed the Dvorak Cello Concerto at a Prom in August 1968, the night after Soviet tanks had driven into Prague to Crush the Prague Spring. There were demonstrations outside and inside the Albert Hall -- you can hear the shouts of protesters at the start of Track 4. A distraught Rostropovich plays with an honest, anguished intensity that finally wins cheers at the end.
In 1943, Mstislav Rostropovich, already a famously incandescent young cellist but an indifferent pianist and composer, sat down at a keyboard in the Moscow Conservatory and banged nervously through a piano concerto he had written. He had an audience of one: Dmitri Shostakovich. The composer was noncommittal about the piece, but he became Rostropovich's neighbor, regular collaborator and close friend. It was one of the most significant meetings in 20th-century musical history. Shostakovich dedicated both… more »
Moisei Weinberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1 begins with a sprightly ballroom melody, a flourish of Haydnesque light-heartedness that the composer earned at unimaginable cost. Dark times do not always yield dark art; it's the stretches of comfortable prosperity that often permit artists to express morbid yearnings. Weinberg, who was victimized by the two most murderous regimes in European history, survived to write music that was poised and passionate, but rarely self-indulgently tragic. For this, he… more »
