Many of you will be familiar with Antonín Dvořák's (1841-1904) second cello concerto - his Op. 104 in B minor from 1895 - but thirty years earlier in 1865 he composed his first cello concerto (B. 10), which has been all but forgotten. Dvořák abandoned the project and left it unorchestrated, and it was only rediscovered in the 1920s by the composer Günter Raphael (1903-1960). In its entirety, the work is over an hour long. There is a version, an orchestration by Dvořák's cataloguer Jarmil Burghauser (1921-1997), which suffers from extensive cuts, but enough material is left to give listeners a good idea of the original work's conception.
