Enjoy a little Mozart today as David Oistrakh plays and conducts the third violin concerto. He performed Mozart when he appeared as a soloist in Raleigh, with the Leningrad Philharmonic (as it was then known), at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, in the fall of 1962 – an interesting time, to be sure, during a long-ago crisis involving our sometime pals, the Russians.
Oistrakh was born in Odessa, which is in Ukraine. There, just hours ago, Ukrainians battled Russians to preserve their freedoms.
What would Oistrakh have thought?