The Russian-born Victoria Yagling (1946 2011) had a career as cellist which served as an excellent accompaniment to the composition she began at an early age. At the Moscow Conservatory she was a cello student of Mstislav Rostropovich and Dmitry Kabalevsky for composition. In her wide composition catalogue the three cello concertos are her main works. Her expressive, romantically orientated style is Russian in spirit and has grown out of the soil provided by Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The first concerto was composed in 1975 and the second one (1983 84) is dedicated to Rostropovich.