Word: concertos
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Treasure Fund. Draped regally in a gold brocade gown, her hair piled high in a bun, Lili Kraus last week began the first lap of her Mozart marathon. In the opening Concerto No. 4, composed when Mozart was eleven, she unfolded the beguilingly simple melodies with a rippling grace and ease; in No. 9 she engaged the Mozart Chamber Orchestra in a lighthearted dialogue that rang with all the gusto of a back-porch gossip fest. And her reading of the passionate No. 20, the most popular of Mozart's piano works, was clean refinement and intense drama...
...Moscow Conservatory, shy, bespectacled and frail as ever, answering cheers at a concert celebrating his 60th birthday. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich received another gift too: the Soviet title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Best of all was the successful first Moscow performance of his new piece, Cello Concerto No. 2, conducted by a similarly slight, bespectacled musician: Dmitri's 28-year-old son Maxim...
...Horse. Kates, the son and grandson of professional string musicians and a student of Gregor Piatigorsky, played the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, with which he had stirred the Moscow judges and audience in June. ("Viennese refinements were out-they wanted guts, they wanted the roof to come down," he said.) Hunching his lanky frame over the cello, Kates boldly carved out the jagged, pulsating lines of the piece with a firm tone and a left hand that skipped deftly through the most prickly technical snares. The roof came down...
Pianist Dichter-who was born in Shanghai midway in his parents' flight from Poland in 1945-also turned on Tanglewood's audiences. He played the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, a risky selection for any young pianist ever since Van Cliburn's powerful, sweeping version of it carried him to victory in the 1958 Moscow competition. But Dichter made the concerto his own, giving it unusual clarity and lightness...
Leinsdorf noted later that Dichter approached the concerto not as if it were an old war horse but as a new piece: "He goes back to the printed instructions of the composer. He does not add a number of silly things which have become traditional." Said Concertmaster Silverstein: "Seldom has the orchestra been so impressed with a single performer...