Completed in 1919, the Cello Concerto was Edward Elgar's last major work for orchestra, and his most confessional. In spite of fleeting moments of idyllic release, it's dominated by disillusionment, ...

Part of How To Classical. Why does the oboe tune the orchestra? Why does the orchestra sit the way it does? What does rosin actually do to a violin bow? If you find the traditions of the classical ...

Both the Penderecki (1982) and Halffter (1985) cello concertos were written for Mstislav Rostropovich and are further tributes to that artist`s unwavering commitment to the contemporary cello ...

The Cello Concerto was the last of the three scores Antonín Dvorák wrote during his three-year residency in the U.S., when he served as director of the National Conservatory in New York City from 1892 ...

This is one of the two most performed cello concertos in the world (the other being by Elgar) and with such a story to tell that it would make a great weepy all on its own. Like the New World Symphony ...

In Esa-Pekka Salonen’s radiant and surprisingly hopeful new Cello Concerto, Yo-Yo Ma is asked to be a combination wave-maker and cloud seeder. What with our winter of drought, those are not unwelcome ...

To some, it remains simply the greatest recording in the history of classical music. Its earliest reviewers instantly recognised what one of them called its "rarest magic." And still, more than 50 ...

Shostakovich wrote his First Cello Concerto for the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. He loved it so much, he learnt the whole piece off-by-heart in four days. Timecodes refer to the ...

The Cello Concerto was the last important work that Elgar wrote. Its first performance, in October 1919, with the composer himself conducting, opened the first post-war season of the London Symphony ...

Somebody once said that the way Elgar chooses to open his Cello Concerto, with those tortured chords sounding as if they have to be excavated from the cello face, is as if Shakespeare had started ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Half a century has passed since the memorable performances of Dvořák's Cello Concerto by the late Jacqueline du ...

Naxos’s valuable and ongoing Penderecki series here couples the Second Cello Concerto of 1982 and the Viola Concerto of 1983. Penderecki made his reputation in the late 1950s as a master of striking, ...