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Charlotte Symphony’s Russian concert a rich three-course meal

Some concerts are macrocosms, leaping across time and borders. Some are microcosms, such as the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra gig Friday at Belk Theater. The CSO played three works composed by Russians over less than 30 years, though the musical distance among them was wider than you'd think.

Master orchestrator Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov kept both feet in the Romantic Era with his resplendent Russian Easter Overture of 1888. Stravinsky, a bridge between the late 19th century and the mid-20th, moved forward in 1911 with his beautiful/barbaric "Petrushka." (The CSO played the 1947 reworking, which uses fewer instruments.) And Sergei Prokofiev's accessible but sometimes tricky Violin Concerto No. 1 showed where music in the Soviet Union was headed after the revolution of 1917.