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Music open thread: Cello concertos [1]

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Date: 2025-09-08

Grammy Award-winning American cellist Yo-Yo Ma won’t be playing at the Kennedy Center anytime soon. Andrew Beaujon reports for Washingtonian that Washington Performing Arts, an organization that represents a few different musicians, including Yo-Yo Ma, will not use the Kennedy Center for any performances this season, preferring instead other venues in or around Washington, D.C.

So, Yo-Yo Ma, for example, will be playing at the Strathmore, roughly a half hour drive from the Kennedy Center. The renowned cellist hadn’t exactly endeared himself to American fascists before. Back in 2019, he had the gall to play concerts in Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.

Those two cities are actually slightly closer to each other than Washington, D.C. and North Bethesda, Maryland (where the Strathmore is located). Laredo to Nuevo Laredo is a 19-minute drive, according to Google Maps… or a 19-hour walk, also according to Google Maps.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, greets Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as they speak during a stop of their "Fighting Oligarchy" tour that filled Civic Center Park, Friday, March 21, 2025, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

I take a moment to digress and wish a happy birthday to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who at 84-years-old is far more vigorous than the White House rooftop monster, who is, at least chronologically, a few years younger. Sanders was born in Brooklyn on September 8, 1941.

Precisely a hundred years prior, Czech composer Antonín Dvořák was born in what would later be Czechoslovakia and is now the Czech Republic. Dvořák did what Johannes Brahms thought of doing: write a cello concerto. Brahms quite famously said that if he had known he could write a cello concerto like that, he would have written one himself a long time prior. Dvořák’s concerto was premiered in 1896, the year of Anton Bruckner’s death and the year before Brahms’s own death.

Here’s Yo-Yo Ma as soloist in Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor.

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All the selections are going to be mellow like that. Except I had forgotten about this next one, which I think I had put in from the very first draft. If Ukrainian-born Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin had written a cello concerto, it might sound a little bit like this one by Friedrich Gulda.

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I didn’t know that renowned pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason came from such a musically talented family. Her brother Sheku is a brilliant cellist, as you can hear in his performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto.

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Did Johannes Brahms not know about Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major? Or maybe he did but he had the same opinion of it as I do. I think it’s pleasant enough while I’m listening to it, but it just doesn’t stick in my mind. However, I recently came across an arrangement by Sergei Nakariakov for flugelhorn instead of cello, which I’m liking a lot better.

It’s entirely possible that Brahms knew nothing by Vivaldi, except maybe by way of Johann Sebastian Bach. Vivaldi was forgotten for about as long as Bach was. Vivaldi wrote cello concertos in every key from three flats to two sharps. This one in D minor is one of three in that key.

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Notice how his cello doesn’t have an endpin.

Vivaldi also wrote this Concerto in G minor for Two Celli.

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Both René Schiffer and Mimé Brinkmann are playing cellos without endpins. This piece sounds familiar to me. Where have I heard it before?

Oh yes, Yo-Yo Ma’s album Vivaldi’s Cello, the very first three tracks. Not sure who plays second cello on that one. I have all the tracks in my iTunes collection, but the booklet I only have in its physical form and I don’t quite remember where I have that at.

Brahms did write a concerto for violin and cello, which I mentioned in an earlier thread. I also mentioned Yo-Yo Ma in that one.

The open thread question: What is your favorite music with cello solos?

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