cello
Peter Quantrill
Hyperbole be damned. The most iconic English classical recording was made on 19 August 1965 in Kingsway Hall, London. Like Maria Callas singing Tosca, Jacqueline du Pré simply was the Elgar Cello Concerto once the LP hit the shops in time for Christmas. Proud, diffident, exuberant, reserved – all those words the English once used of themselves became freely associated with both performer and work, the two almost indistinguishable from one another in popular imagination.Again like Callas, she was a heaven-sent gift for EMI, and not a moment too soon. By 1965 Callas was on the slide – she had Read more ...
Guy Johnston
This adventure began in 2014 when my cello turned 300 years old. As birthdays go, it was a big one, so for me it felt important to do something special to celebrate. Why not imagine a journey back to Rome where it was made?The role of the cello has evolved greatly over the last 300 years, so I was intrigued to imagine the variety of experience this instrument has had over the years. It also prompted me to think about my own musical roots and journey, and how these two journeys converged. I first learnt about Tecchler cellos through my teacher, Steven Doane, who has been a Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Guy Johnston: Tecchler’s Cello - From Cambridge to Rome (King’s College Cambridge)Acquiring a second-hand instrument always leads one to wonder what sort of a life it led before. Did said instrument enjoy a flourishing professional career, or was it abandoned in an attic for decades? Cherished by a master or mistreated by a bumbling amateur? Guy Johnston’s enjoyable anthology celebrates his recent acquisition of a 300-year-old cello made by one David Tecchler. He was a Bavarian-born craftsman who pitched up in Rome towards the end of the 17th century, one of his workshops being situated Read more ...
David Nice
Three “little greats,” as Opera North might put it, proved just the thing to cleanse the palate in a quiet place the afternoon after the LSO/Rattle Stravinsky trilogy. Composed following a breakdown in 1914, the year after the premiere of The Rite of Spring and only two years before his untimely death at the age of 43, Max Reger’s Cello Suites are not so much early neo-Baroque – Bach is the unescapable role model, unequivocally homaged in the first – as neo-everything, and even proto-Prokofiev in the second movement of No. 2. To hear them played with impassioned resonance in a religious space Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Mompou: Fêtes Lointaines Steffen Schleiermacher (piano) (MDG)“I am not a composer and don't want to be regarded as one… somehow, I always have the feeling that it comes to me from outside.” There is indeed something otherworldly about Federico Mompou’s spare, understated music, and it’s interesting that several pianists who excel in this repertoire also specialise in performing works by other fringe minimalists. Steffen Schleiermacher is one, having previously recorded discs of Feldman and Cage. Not that Mompou’s output is as outré as theirs: you’d place him close to Satie and Poulenc on the Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who missed the opening Southbank concerts of the Chinike! Orchestra, figurehead of a foundation which aims to give much-needed help to young Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) classical musicians, could and now can (on YouTube) catch snippets of the players in action on the splendid documentary about young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. There's no doubt at all that Kanneh-Mason, BBC Young Musician 2016, who reprised his already celebrated interpretation of Haydn's C major Cello Concerto in All Saints Hove on Saturday night to launch the Brighton Festival, is the real deal, and so are the Read more ...
David Nice
Many other top Estonian musicians, performing among other works 30 premieres of music by their compatriots in just over a week, might have been equally deserving candidates for the lead image. But perhaps an even more appropriate image might have been a black rectangle. For the life-changing event of the 38th Estonian Music Days, in my experience, was the nearly two-hour darkness behind a blindfold - the experimental heart of this year's festival theme, "Through the Dimness" ("Dusk" might be a more effective translation).For "Obscure Avenues" curated by Taavi Kerikmäe, 40 or so of us were put Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Telemann Fantasias for solo violin Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) (Prah Recordings)Telemann, too readily dismissed as a plodding hack, gets a radical makeover here; the tracklisting makes it seem as if Aisha Orazbayeva is giving us six of the composer’s solo violin fantasias. Almost; the music’s all there in essence, though sometimes “in versions marked by the distortion and fragmentation of the material through the use of contemporary violin techniques.” The acoustic of a rural Suffolk church also plays a key role, the album’s opening track being a three-minute slice of soothing background Read more ...
William Green
Apocalyptica are a band that became famous for playing Metallica on cellos. And tonight they’re playing only Metallica covers because it's 20 years since they released Plays Metallica by Four Cellos, their debut album. The quartet formed at Finland’s Sibelius Academy in 1993 and the man responsible for bringing together classical cellists to play metal is Eicca Toppinen. Tonight, referring to their debut album, he admits that they were “expecting to sell 1,000 CDs”. Six million albums later and constantly on tour they return to their roots: without Metallica there would be no Apocalyptica. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Wherever you are in the world, opportunities to see Cecilia Bartoli perform are hard to come by. A one-off chance to see her sing Mozart in Rome was not to be missed. This was a rare homecoming for Bartoli. Born in Rome, she studied at the city’s Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia where many members of the orchestra teach. A quarter-century and more ago, she made her name in Mozart: as in irrepressibly cheeky Cherubino; a Zerlina more than capable of standing up to the Don’s predations; a Dorabella who always seemed to know better than her sister. She does not do doormats.These days, with due Read more ...
David Nice
What's not to like, or love, would have to be the sensible response to both the opening programme of Kings Place's year-long Cello Unwrapped festival at Kings Place and its life-enhancing execution. Symmetries abounded – between Alban Gerhardt's double-stopping summons with the "Canto Primo" of Britten's First Cello Suite at the start and his late-night farewell symphony, Kodály's towering Sonata for solo cello; also between two glistening suites for which the label "neo-Baroque" is too narrow, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin and Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Nicholas Collon and his Aurora players Read more ...
Natalie Clein
The cello is so deeply engrained in my fingers, my imagination, it’s part of my being – my life would feel amputated without it. You fall in love with the instrument, the music, and then you embark on the life-long task of trying to get closer to that beguiling musical ideal. That’s the drug, the contract you sign with the devil. Every day I think how lucky I am that I can dive into a score and work at it physically.In Cello Unwrapped, a year-long festival of the instrument at Kings Place which opens on Saturday 7 January with two performances by Alban Gerhardt, I’m performing in three Read more ...