Rodion Shchedrin

In August 2022, the musicians of the Rachmaninoff International Orchestra gathered in Bratislava to perform their first recording under the direction of founder and artistic director Mikhail Pletnev. There is an acclaimed arrangement of Swan Lake by Mikhail Pletnev, coupled with Rodion Shchedrin's famous arrangement of the Carmen Suite from Bizet's masterpiece.

The Mariinsky Orchestra recordings with Denis Matsuev, "the Siberian bear with the fastest paws in the Arctic," have all offered classic Russian virtuosity at its best. This one, containing three distinctly high-spirited works, makes a great place to start with the series, and it's hard to imagine the listener who wouldn't succumb to its charms.

It takes remarkable powers of concentration for a performer to sustain nearly an hour of solo cello music without any support from an accompanying instrument. In this formidable sequence of works the young Russian cellist Boris Andrianov does that triumphantly…The well-known folk-based Song of the Birds by Pablo Casals…brings a performance notably purer than those of Casals himself, at least in his last years. It makes an intensely beautiful close.

It should have been just another memorable con­cert in the hectic life of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra. However, the global Covid-19 pandemic decided otherwise and turned this summit meeting with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy and pianist Mikhaïl Pletnev into a historical moment. Chronicle of an extraordinary adventure…in every respect…