Of Dmitry Kabalevsky's six instrumental concertos, a body of work that includes three piano concertos, a pair of cello concertos and the one violin concerto, all composed over a span of nearly 40 years, half are explicitly meant for the education and enjoyment of young performers. The other three, however, are a different matter: the first two piano concertos and the Cello Concerto No. 2 in C minor/major, Op. 77, of 1964, while by no means extreme in difficulty, have a grittiness to them—a full-blooded drama quite absent in the markedly lighter youth concertos. If the Second Piano Concerto is Kabalevsky's finest instrumental creation, the Cello Concerto No. 2, many feel, comes in a close second.

The concerto has three connected movements: 1. Molto sostenuto—Allegro molto e energico, 2. Presto marcato, 3. Andante con moto—Allegro. The orchestra is of average size and, except for the inclusion of a saxophone, standard in makeup. A scruffy timpani roll, a contrabass line whose only support is an occasional thunk from the lowest strings of the harp, and a "sonorous" (Kabalevsky's marking, in fact) pizzicato solo cello tune make for an ear-catching start, and soon the flutes, enthralled, take up the soloist's idea. But just as we are starting to feel comfortable in this opening musical paragraph, Kabalevsky shifts gears, and a scrambling Allegro, driven by mini-arpeggios, takes off on a journey of its own. The sudden shift from the Andante's C minor to the E minor home-base of the Allegro is anything but Classical, and Kabalevsky decides to let us have it again—this time in reverse—when a brief reprise of the opening Andante is made. It is in fact not so much a reprise as it is a transition to the movement's cadenza, which itself is used to make the transition from the first movement into the second.

The lengthy Presto marcato is a stubborn, prickly affair that can't decide between 3/8 and 2/4 meter and so devotes large sections of music to each. Again transition to the following movement is made via cadenza; this time the cello gets some help from the timpani and cymbals.

For the quick music of the final movement Kabalevsky revives the flying mini-arpeggios of the first movement. But this Allegro stuff has to contend with a series of more tranquil episodes (one of which is heard at the beginning of the movement), and in the end it is quietude, in the shape of a wholesome C major harmony (colored by the inclusion of the non-harmonic tone D) in the strings and a calm thirty-second note rustling from the solo cello, rather than action that prevails.

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