Copland Quiet City Shostakovich Cello Concerto No 2 Britten arr Cooke & Mitchell Prince of the Pagodas - Suite
Michael Tilson Thomas conductor Yo-Yo Ma cello London Symphony Orchestra
Copland’s melancholic Quiet City is a musical re-imagining of Irwin Shaw’s play which for Copland expressed the ‘nostalgia and inner distress of a society profoundly aware of its own insecurity’. Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto opens with an elegiac solo cello line that as it cuts into the rest of the orchestra has been imagined as the drama of the individual against the mob. Britten’s ballet suite was written following a holiday in Bali and absorbs the shimmering sounds of the island’s Gamelan.