Word: mstislav
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Exuberant & Witty. Performed by Russia's eminent cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the visiting Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, the 28-minute concerto emerged as a work of compelling rhythms, long, curving lyric lines, exuberantly witty folklike figurations. Although its technical demands were tremendous ("If Shostakovich had written two more bars for the cadenza," said Rostropovich, "I could not have played them"), the acrobatics were not merely contrived, as has been true of so much of Shostakovich's recent work, notably his vapid, bombastic Eleventh Symphony. The concerto, wrote the Sunday Times, presented "a real conflict and a final solution...
...musical comedy. She sang at the Leningrad Operetta Theater during the war, sandwiching performances between stints of rubble clearing in the streets. In 1952 she graduated to the Bolshoi Opera, is now preparing the leading role in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Married to famed Russian Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Soprano Vishnevskaya has two daughters, lives comfortably in a six-room Moscow apartment, draws a top Soviet artist's salary of $1,500 a month...