February 20, 1932

Russian violoncellist Gregor Piatigorsky performed a richly varied program ranging from Bach to Stravinsky in the Students’ Building. Writing in The Miscellany News, Louise Jacob ’32 said Patigorsky’s “tone last Saturday night was like molten gold.” The “dignity” of PIatigorsky’s tone in a cello sonata by Andrea Caporale, she said, “was accompanied by an effortless naiveté, a sense of outflowing. It prevented the intensity of the Bach Suite in C Major from exceeding the bounds of loftiness and self-possession. The saving grace of the Lamento by Fauré and the ‘lamenting’ Étude by Scriabin was this same dignity.”

The Misc. writer was less taken with the rendition of Stavinsky’s 1932 Suite Italienne. Apparently unaware that Stravinsky had written the work in collaboration with Piatigorsky, she advised that it “could have benefited by a less weighty treatment. It is not important music; its charm, if any, is in the fantastic skipping about. To treat is as if it were something weighty adds further confusion to the mind of the already puzzled listener. The performer is, however, to be somewhat excused if he was baffled by the Stravinsky Suite, for it was quite uncellistic.”

The Miscellany News