Released for Record Store Day 2017.
Limited to 3000 copies.

Recorded 25.XI.1967, Great Hall, Moscow Conservatoire.
℗ 1997 Mstislav Rostropovich.
© 2017 Parlophone Records Limited.

In the 1950s Roentgenizdat – or X-ray publishing – became a trend in Soviet counterculture. ‘Bone music’ and ‘rock on ribs’ are two other terms that describe these bootleg recordings of music from the West, ingeniously cut onto X-ray film discarded by hospitals. This Record Store Day release bears an X-ray image of a spine and pelvis – with a 1966 recording that has its own underground history. When the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007) was exiled from the USSR in the 1970s, a resourceful Soviet archivist saved the original tape from destruction by hiding it in a mislabeled box. It is Rostropovich’s world-premiere performance of the Cello Concerto No. 2 by his teacher and mentor Dmitri Shostakovich, recorded live in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire with the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov, on the composer’s 60th birthday. This is its first ever release on LP, in a numbered, limited-edition pressing of 3,000.