The Naxos label rolls on with its Russian-originated series of recordings of music by Aram Khachaturian, featuring a variety of orchestras and solo performers. With this album by the little-known but entirely able Moscow City Symphony Orchestra and cellist Dmitry Yablonsky, who returned to Russia after emigrating to the U.S. in the 1970s, they've come up with a real winner. The big news is the Cello Concerto in E minor, composed in 1946 and never a terribly popular piece despite the relative sparsity of concerto repertoire ...
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The Naxos label rolls on with its Russian-originated series of recordings of music by Aram Khachaturian, featuring a variety of orchestras and solo performers. With this album by the little-known but entirely able Moscow City Symphony Orchestra and cellist Dmitry Yablonsky, who returned to Russia after emigrating to the U.S. in the 1970s, they've come up with a real winner. The big news is the Cello Concerto in E minor, composed in 1946 and never a terribly popular piece despite the relative sparsity of concerto repertoire for the instrument. Annotator Richard Whitehouse blames the concerto's eclipse on its rather grim mood, which he attributes to the wartime mode of thinking in which Khachaturian remained. The first movement, indeed, uses the strings and winds in the orchestral exposition to produce a unique kind of nervous shimmer. But the finale is a rousing essay in Khachaturian's Armenian idiom, and the concerto balances cello and orchestra in various interesting ways and is full of the composer's...
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