Serge Prokofiev & Johannes Brahms: Concertos for Cello and Orchestra

One of the world’s best cellists, a People’s Artist of the USSR, and an owner of the State Prize of Russia, Natalia Gutman received four competition prizes (the World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna in 1959 and the Prague Spring International Music Festival in 1961, a silver medal of the All-Union Competition of Performing Musicians in 1961 and the third prize of the 1962 International Tchaikovsky Competition) when she was a student. In the third round of the Moscow tournament, she made a brilliant appearance with Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto, the great composer’s last work which was yet to be estimated by its true worth.

Sviatoslav Richter, Isaac Stern, Viktor Tretiakov, Yuri Bashmet, Eliso Virsaladze and many others have been the cellist’s ensemble partners. Natalia Gutman’s brightest artistic alliance was with her husband and remarkable violinist Oleg Kagan (1946–1990). A pupil of David Oistrakh, silver prize winner of the 1966 International Tchaikovsky Competition and owner of the first prizes of the 1965 International Jean Sibelius Competition in Helsinki and the 1968 International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig, Oleg Kagan was famous as a soloist and ensemble performer, and fine interpreter of classical and contemporary music. His death interrupted his active performing career in the prime of his life.