Word: concertos
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PROKOFIEV: SYMPHONY-CONCERTO FOR CELLO AND ORCHESTRA (RCA Victor). Prokofiev had no affinity for the cello, but with the counsel of Soviet Cellist Mstislav Rostropoyich, he made his cello concerto one of his loveliest works. Here it is impeccably performed by Erich Leinsdorf, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Cellist Samuel Mayes in a recording that also includes Gabriel Fauré's noble little...
...program of last night's Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra concert showed the difference between musical bankruptcy and thematic economy. Shostakovich's Concerto for Violoncello deserves far less than it got (a very good performance from Pierre Fournier); it repeats monotonously to short themes that would have been cut even from a Hasty Pudding show...
...playing the Shostakovich, Fournier never missed. Up high, his nearly faultless harmonics combined with the violins and bells to produce one of the delightful, but inconsequential, aural tricks in which the concerto abounded. His extended cadenza in the third movement lacked raw strength, but it was exquisite. Why he or conductor Henry Swoboda put their talents and the HRO's into this concerto is hard to understand...
Alegrias and Shostakovich's Concerto could, happily, be forgotten in the second half of the program, when they were replaced by the Brahms. The Brahms would have been better if the orchestra had tuned before playing it, but it still justified Harvard's having its own symphony orchestra...
Rubinstein playing Mozart's Concerto No. 20 and Haydn's Andante and Variations in F Minor (RCA Victor) is only slightly less inspired. He brings a kind of melancholy serenity to Mozart and a flashing excitement to Haydn's study in manic-depressive music; in a single phrase, his mood shifts from joy to despair...