Claudio Abbado conducted Russian music with a real sense of authority, and Prokofiev's famous cantata sounded superb, with the Festival Chorus in wonderfully pungent form. Even the great Galina Vishnevskaya was available to deliver the moving lament.
What made this all-Prokofiev concert even more superb was the first part, in which Vishnevskaya's husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, was the soloist in the fiendishly difficult Sinfonia Concertante in E minor, op125. The great cellist was in majestic form, and made it easy to see why Prokofiev had composed the work for him.
The great Russian dissident couple had been thrown out by the Soviet authorities the previous year, and were suddenly available. They combined in one concert, in which she sang the Shostakovich orchestration of Musorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death and he conducted the programme, including Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony. They would return to Edinburgh in 1976, when she sang in Verdi's Macbeth with Scottish Opera.
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