Shostakovich work in the heroic mould We have heard several of Russia's fine orchestras here in recent years. Last night another, the Moscow Radio Orchestra. was added to their number, when they played at the Albert Hall-the first of four programmes at the Prorns before they travel north to the festivals at Harrogate and Edinburgh. It was an all-Russian progranmne under a conductor we know well by now, Mr. Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. Only one of the three works gave the orchestra much chance to show its paces: Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, in which we heard some delightfully warm tone and relaxed, supple phrasing from the strings (in the cello counter-theme to the first movement's second subject, for example; or indeed in the movement's main theme, on violins and cellos). The woodwind soloists also shaped their music with delicacy and distinction. especially the oboe and bassoon in the Canzona; the brass displayed brilliance and precision of attack, and firm tone with a touch of vibrato-Mr. Rozhdest- vensky gave them their head in the finale, and a little too generously, for it lent a suggestion of hardness, even brutality, to an otherwise affectionate but unsenti- mental reading. The evening started with a Shostako- vich work new to western Europe, his cantata The Death of Stepan Razin, to a Yevtushenko text. Razin was leader of a seventeenth-century peasant revolt. and thus a suitable figure for apostro- phizing. It would perhaps be unfair to say that Shostakovich's work is in the familiar official-heroic mould: there are passages of considerable distinction, like the quiet music for chorus with high violins just before (and just after) the execution; and brassy march-like mate- rial at the start is in its way effective. and the setting of Razin's final words is not without character. The solo part was sung by Mr. Vitaly Gromadsky, a bass with a characteristically Russian depth of tone and an uncommon clarity of line and diction-we will hope to hear much more of him. The B.B.C. Chorus and Choral Society were in attendance. In Rachmaninov's fourth concerto the soloist was Mr. Nicolai Petrov. He gave the impression of being an accom- plished piarist, with a leaning to cool lyTicism and little interest in display for its own sake; but no pianist should be judged in a work which speaks in so faltering a voice (faltering because arti- ficially grafted on to the composer's own) or in a performance where the piano's pitch was painfully different from the orcbestra's. Shostakovich work inz the heroic mould