Russian cello

Last Friday night's Kennedy Center expedition was to hear the National Symphony Orchestra play one of its tribute concerts for its late conductor laureate, Mstislav Rostropovich, who led the orchestra from 1977 to 1994 and who died earlier this year. The first time I ever heard the NSO when I was first at Georgetown in 1978, Rostropovich was on the podium.

The main feature of the concert was Dmitri Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107, a work that was actually composed in 1959 specifically for Rostropovich to play. Heinrich Schiff played the work. Schiff is an older man with an unruly shock of long white hair who has an interesting way of draping himself over his cello when he plays.

The concerto is a difficult, virtuosic work. I happened to like it, as well as the performance, though I don't think the other three guys in my group appreciated it.

We had good seats down front that gave us a fine view of Schiff and his cello, so we could actually see his fingering. We also got to watch guest conductor Roberto Minczuk, who seemed fairly standard in his conducting. He was wearing a black bow tie and cummerbund with his tail coat instead of the standard white piqué bow tie and waistcoat, so he kept reminding me of a waiter.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Rimsky-Korsakov's famous tone poem Scheherazade, Op. 35. It's often loud and brassy, so the other guys liked it a lot. I was less than excited about sitting through it, since this is one of those "old war horse" piece I've heard at children's concerts all my life, and it regularly gets in the rotation on classical radio stations. But, I actually heard some new colors in the work, since we were sitting right by the orchestra, so the brass was right there without being blended into the background by some sound engineer. One thing about Rimsky-Korsakov, he certainly was a master of orchestration.

The first work of the evening was a rather odd Homenaje a Federico García Lorca by early 20th century Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. It's a short piece—about ten minutes—in three movements for a tiny orchestra, but it all had this odd, bright, unfinished sound to it, and it wasn't my favorite.