Mozart Flute Concert

LONDON, Dec. 18— The Soviet-born cellist Mstislav Rostropovich played in a benefit concert for Armenian earthquake victims Saturday night, after postponing a visit to India in order to participate in the event.
''It was very important for me to take part in this concert,'' the 61-year-old musician said before a last-minute rehearsal with the flutist James Galway, the conductor Andre Previn and other musicians who rearranged their schedules and donated time to perform….

Mozart's Piano Concerto in D Minor, K. 466, is one of only two written in the minor. The key of D minor is highly significant and underlines the tragic character of the concerto. Written in great haste and completed just a day before its premiere, Mozart played the concerto on February 11, 1785, at a subscription concert in Vienna. Mozart’s father, Leopold, wrote to his daughter Anna Maria (Nannerl) after the concert: “Then we had a new and very fine concerto by Wolfgang, that the copyist was still working on when we arrived, and the rondo of which your brother didn’t even have the time to play through, as he had to supervise the copying.”

Founded in 1969 at the Juilliard School of Music, the Tokyo Quartet have amassed a fine and distinguished array of recordings for various labels, many enthusiastically received. In 2013 they disbanded after their longest serving members, the second violin Kikuei Ikeda and viola Kazuhide Isomura, decided to retire. Their final concert took place in Norfolk, Connecticut on 6 July 2013. For the last ten years of their existence, they were contracted to the Harmonia Mundi stable.