Cello Concerto No. 1

Victoria Yagling (1946−2011) was born in Russia and lived in Finland since 1990. Her long career as a cellist served as an excellent accompaniment to the composition she began at an early age. For 11 years she was a cello student of Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatory and Dmitry Kabalevsky and Tikhon Khrennikov taught her composition. Yagling won the first prize in the Gaspar Cassadò Cello Competition and the following year the second prize in the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition. Her solo engagements took her to countless countries. She has also taught at several international music courses and master classes and was often a jury member for international cello competitions.

Yagling left a profilic oeuvre, and the three cello concertos are her main works. Her other orchestral works include Finnish Notebook, Lyrical Preludes and the Suite for Cello and String Orchestra. She has also composed solo works (e.g. the Suite for Cello Solo No. 1 chosen as an obligatory piece for the 7th Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1982), chamber works, including two string quartets, and vocal music. Her expressive, romantically orientated style is Russian in spirit and has grown out of the soil provided by Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Concerto No. 1 for violoncello and orchestra was composed in 1975 and the composer edited the piano reduction in 2004. As a cellist who possessed an exceptional knowledge of her instrument, she carefully marked in her scores all the smallest instrumental details, fingerings included.