The Queen's Hall chamber series today featured a father and daughter recital - Mischa Maisky on cello and Lily Maisky playing the piano. Born in Latvia in l948 and educated in Russia, Maisky had the privilege of studying for four years with the twentieth century's greatest cello player Rostropovich, who became a second father to him after his own father died unexpectedly in l966.
However, in l970, he was arrested for buying a tape recorder on the black market and sentenced to a Soviet labour camp for eighteen months. When he got out he started playing again, emigrated to Israel, and launched his international career in l975. Since then he has developed the reputation of being one of the world's most talented cellists.
In this entire Russian programme, the first half consisted of a selection of Russian songs, romances, written by a variety of composers - Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, Glazanov, and Rachmaninov. What was unusual about this song cycle was the fact that no singer was actually involved, for Mischa Maisky transcribed the vocal lines into cello parts and thus created "songs without words." Did it work? Yes, I think so. He is a great cellist, capable of extracting exquisite tones from the instrument and his interpretation of songs that are obviously of a passionate nature is very moving.
His daughter, Lily Maisky, also has a beautiful touch. Her playing has an emotional maturity that belies her relatively young age of twenty-one. In the second half of the recital, they played Shostakovich's Cello Sonata in D minor Op 40, a piece they "have played many times before." In this, as in the "romances," their playing complements one another marvellously.
Time: Aug 21 at 11:00