Britten's Cello Symphony

Extract

In a review of the Cello Sonata in these pages, I suggested that Britten had paid Rostropovich a musician's compliment in writing a cello part which assumed technical mastery yet provided little occasion for its ostentatious demonstration. Such a compliment aptly summarizes the basis on which so fruitful a chamber-music partnership as theirs must exist, but to repeat it before the wider and less intimate audience of the orchestral concert is to run the risk of being misunderstood. It may be for this reason that the composer has chosen not to give his new work, for Rostropovich's cello and orchestra, the customary title ‘concerto’; but at least as many initial misunderstandings are likely to arise from his decision, wholly justifiable though it is, to call it a ‘symphony’.