Kennedy Center And National Symphony To Offer Performances Of Bach, Shostakovich, Bernstein, And Tchaikovsky In Tribute To Mstislav Rostropovich

This Saturday, May 19, 2007, at 6 PM, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Symphony Orchestra will offer a free tribute concert -- in the Concert Hall -- to the NSO's great conductor laureate, Mstislav Rostropovich. The program will open with the cello section of the NSO performing the Sarabande from J.S. Bach's Suite No. 6 for unaccompanied cello (BWV 1012). Next will be the Largo movement from Dmitri Shostakovich's powerful Symphony #5 [which is, in fact, too powerful to be programmed on the new Classical WETA-FM Lite, in the Nation's Capital]. Then there will be another work banned by the new Classical WETA-FM Lite, in the Nation's Capital: Leonard Bernstein's Slava! (A Political Overture), which includes satirical recordings of political speeches. Next will be the Finale from Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, the "Pathetique". The evening tribute will close with a recorded performance, by Rostropovich playing the cello alone, of the Bach Sarabande that opened the tribute.

[Today, the new Classical WETA-FM Lite, in the Nation's Capital, broke its weeklong boycott of ALL American classical music -- including tokenist, short single movements of early American piano works -- by broadcasting Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.]

Source for tribute programming: PlaybillArts.com.





















This sculpture of Shostakovich's head, by Russian artist Ernst Neizvestny, was one of Mstislav Rostropovich's late cold war gifts to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the American people. This gift occured at a time when the military-industrial complexes of both the United States and the Soviet Union were each aiming tens of thousands of nuclear-tipped missles at each other's major population centers.

Photo credit: Via http://www.cannes.artinfo.ru/ru/exhibition.htm With thanks. (This is a very interesting contemporary visual arts website.)