1990 New Year’s Eve Concert with Mstislav Rostropovich

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky created a masterpiece with his fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet, which shortly before his 30th birthday laid the foundation for his international career: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov called the lyrical melody that characterises the two lovers one of the most beautiful themes in Russian music. There are also appealing melodies in Tchaikovsky’s Valse-Scherzo, a real bravura piece of the violin repertoire. The melancholy waltz serenade is followed by a lively scherzo with no less than three solo cadenzas, whose technical intricacies require the greatest possible virtuosity. The andante cantabile is actually the folk-inspired second movement from Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet. The composer himself wrote the arrangement for cello and orchestra. According to reports, this simple and melancholy movement moved Lev Tolstoy to tears when a quartet from the Moscow conservatory played it in 1877.

Alfred Schnittke, who taught at the same conservatory in Moscow as Tchaikovsky, also composed melodies in the folk idiom. For example, in his Monologue for viola and string orchestra, in which the catchy viola melody (representing the individual) is silenced by brutal orchestral beats (the masses). Dmitri Shostakovich was also silenced – at least for a while – by the infamous Pravda article Chaos instead of music, in which his successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denigrated as “neurotic music”. It was not until long after Stalin’s death and during the Khrushchev thaw that the masterpiece returned to the stage as Katerina Ismailova. Mstislav Rostropovich took the original version with him to the West when he left the Soviet Union and recorded it on disc. In this first version, the music between the acts is less closely linked to the scenes, making it ideal for performing as a suite in the concert hall.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Mstislav Rostropovich

Vladimir Spivakov

Yuri Bashmet