Dmitri Shostakovich was a tireless worker who composed while standing in elevators and took breaks from composing by rearranging the works of others. Best known among those efforts are his Mussorgsky orchestrations, including the 'Songs and Dances of Death' and the opera 'Khovanshchina.' Like Mussorgsky, Robert Schumann was considered suspect as an orchestrator by some critics, and just before writing his Second Cello Concerto, Shostakovich reworked Schumann's Cello Concerto as a vehicle for Mstislav Rostropovich, making it bigger and darker in sound, exchanging delicacy for drama and placing the work more in the sphere of late romanticism.
There are no such suspicions concerning the quality of the Cello Concerto of Boris Tishchenko, but Shostakovich felt his pupil's all wind and percussion orchestration was too radical and recast it for a more conventional ensemble while retaining much of the work's haunting expressive power.
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