For reasons no-one (not even herself) can explain, Janie is quite partial to Shostakovich, yet cannot abide Prokofiev.
Anyway, a client offered Janie a pair of fine seats at this concert and we said yes.
According to my log, we:
bumped into John and Angela [Kessler] there.
From memory, we encountered cousin Angela and John, rather than actually having a collision with them. I don’t think I knew, at that time, that Angela was on the Board of the LPO and I suspect that Angela and John were too polite to mention that fact.
We heard:
- Bernd Alois Zimmerman – Trumpet Concerto “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See”
- Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony No 7 in C, Op 60 “Lenningrad”
Janie and I loved the Leningrad Symphony as performed that night by the LPO under the baton of Kurt Masur. I didn’t see the following review at the time, but Brian Hunt in The Torygraph bore out our assessment – he absolutely loved this concert:
LPO Shostakovich Hunt Telegraph 25 Oct 1997, Sat The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
A belated thank you to the kind donor of our brace of tickets, who I think went globetrotting or something of that kind instead. Look what you missed.
About the same time I saw the LPO under Masur doing the Brahms violin concerto (with a-the-barely known Gidon Kremer). It was a gorgeous performance – “incredibly lush” my companion called it. had barely heard of Masur before that evening and I think he was and remains a peculiarly underrated conductor.
For me the Leningrad Symphony has said all it needs to say by the end of the First Movement. When I saw it/heard it at the Proms under the baton of…. I can’t remember… I sneaked out after that. Is that sacrilege? Can’t understand how anyone could like Shostakovich and not Prokofiev. It’s not as if they’re that different.