Terrific! What gorgeous phrasing and control of dynamics from both the orchestra and Mr. Barnatan. I loved the playful adventurous use of slightly over the top horns in a few paasages because, as the program notes so accurately describe, that was Beethoven’s spirit – sublimely beautiful jokester. Gilbert has brought this orchestra together to make real music. Thank you, UMS!

Yes, I freely admit it: I nodded off for a few minutes during the first of the two Britten Suites. I heard some steady deep breathing behind me, and this evidently inspired me. But my wife came to my rescue and brought me back. I was mighty chagrined to have missed even a little of this composition, which I had never heard before. After that, I was riveted for the rest of the concert. But from what I heard during the intermission, an evening of solo cello is not everyone's cup of tea. Hell, what do you expect in a media culture like ours that tries so hard and with every means to shrink our attention span?! This was a concert for adults!

Britten is inexhaustible. It's hard to think of a composer who is not only endlessly inventive in a traditional thematic sense, but also scoops the last little bit of sonic potential out of the cello. Bartok was a bit like that, I suppose. He, too, knew things about string instruments that seem to have escaped everyone else. And moods! Britten gives us everything from teasing to ghosts to whistling rascals to dirges to pratfalls to laments – it's all there. Sometimes it's only a gesture. Only a gesture? A gesture in music, like in the rest of life, is a hint of unrealized possibility. "Just think where this could go if…"

The Bach suites were played in an uncompromising fashion, not souped up with exaggerated accents, not romanticized. Straight up! I love not only the danciness of old Johann sebastian with his oodles of children in the background somewhere, but also the way he leads the listener through a seemingly meandering long melodic corridor to a terminal sunny clearing that, after you have heard it, is loaded with inevitability.

Julia Fischer canceled her US tour for "family reasons." (My guess is she has a colicky baby; I seem to recall she was pregnant last year when she was here.) But Pieter Wispelwey, the Dutch cellist, is a phenomenon. Not only is he a technical wizard, but he's also a musician of integrity (and wit). I congratulated the UMS President on his good luck in having found this artist to replace Julia Fischer. He replied, "You know you can count on us." True!