大象传媒

Summer Chamber Music in the Ulster Hall.

Tatjana Vasiljeva, cello, and Etsuko Hirose, piano.
Stravinsky: Suite Italienne.
Prokofiev: Cello Sonata in C major.
Tchaikovsky: Pezzo Capriccioso

Russian cellist Tatjana Vasiljeva has built a formidable reputation as one of the leading cellists of today. While she has won many competitions and awards, it was as winner of the First Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris at the 7th Concours de Violoncelle Rostropovitch in 2001 - the first Russian to be awarded the top prize in the history of the competition - and as 'Revelation from Abroad' at the 2005 Victoires de la Musique Classique that Tatjana first received international recognition.

In this programme from the Ulster Hall in Belfast, Tatjana is accompanied by Japanese pianist Etsuko Hirose, whose first prize at the Martha Argerich Competition in 1999 marked the point of departure for her solo career.

First up is Stravinsky's Suite Italienne for cello and piano - an arrangement of several movements from his ballet Pulcinella (1919-1920). In Pulcinella, Stravinsky had taken works attributed to the early eighteenth-century Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and effectively rewritten them by cutting, altering, and transforming the music into his own style. The result was a work which was, in Stravinsky's words, "the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible."

Prokofiev's Cello Sonata in C follows - after the premiere of which by Mstislav Rostropovich and Sviatoslav Richter in 1950, Prokofiev's close friend Nikolai Miaskovsky's wrote: "Yesterday Rostropovich and Richter openly played the Cello Sonata by Prokofiev in concert - a miraculous piece of music!".