Blasts from the Past: Dmitri Shostakovich – Cello Concerto No. 2

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Vladimir

Consider also both the cello concertos by Shostakovich recorded by Natalia Gutman with British orchestra (don’t remember exactly) under the baton of Yury Temirkanov for RCA red seal series (long ago out of print)

Chris L

Many thanks, Simon, for shining a spotlight on a DSCH work with which I wasn’t familiar (unlike its far-more-frequently-performed forebear). I agree that it’s another one of those marvellous instances (like, for me, the 5th String Quartet, a personal favourite; c/f the frankly overrated 8th Quartet) where the two modes of expression you identify somehow combine in such a way as to amount to more than the sum of their parts. (I also enjoyed the final movement intrusions of what sounded a lot to me – although I’m not convinced it was the composer’s intention! – of the archetypal “rock beat”, i.e. what you describe as a drum machine…)

sashabass

Many thanks. Yes agreed bout the work occupying a high place in late DSCH output. Alongside many many others of course..I’d always held Rostropovich on DG in high regard..Interested to hear this performance..To think that this composition was written when music of Boulez, Stockhausen was in ascendancy in Western Europe..And Boulez’s views on DSCH are pretty much obscene..I think in one article he described him as watered down Mahler!! I kind of get the feeling that works like this one here will still be around whereas so many of Darmstadt school will be oddly enough consigned to ‘historical flavour of the month’..Which is somewhat ironic given that DSCH was dismissed by many of that school for being ‘historical’…Thanks for the post.

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