Detente

Camerata Pacifica’s April Concert

At Victoria Hall Theater, Friday, April 7.

Reviewed by Charles Donelan

Two unusual and overtly confrontational pieces in the first half
of this concert — by Alfred Schnittke and William Bolcom — set the
stage for a marvelously warm, if not exactly relaxed Shostakovich
cello sonata in the second. Psychologically and, in the case of the
Bolcom, chronologically, the evening harkened back to the 20-year
era of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union
known as détente, when the Cold War melted a little around the
edges.