Berner Flex

In September 2020 Florian Berner travelled to Tuscany. Playing in the local church, and initially just for himself, he recorded the first three of Bach’s six suites for solo cello. By early 2023 he completed the cycle in Köthen, where Bach was Capellmeister from 1717-1722. The two separate experiences captured performances of unique intuition and power.

Continuing his impressive series of Anton Bruckner's symphonies on CPO, Mario Venzago leads the Bern Symphony Orchestra in period style performances of the Symphony No. 3 in D minor (1889 version) and the Symphony No. 6 in A major (1881 version), using scores edited by Leopold Nowak. Venzago strives for historically informed performances that give varying perspectives on Bruckner's development, employing different orchestras with each release to reveal important differences in the composer's orchestral conceptions and to show that there wasn't one prescription of how the symphonies should sound. Instead, Venzago rejects the massive and heavy-handed interpretations of the early 20th century and tries to re-create the 19th century sound world in all its variety and intimacy. The glistening, vibrato-less string tone, pungent woodwinds, and crisp brass and timpani are easily distinguished from the more homogenized tone colors of a modern symphony orchestra, and Venzago ensures that these distinctive timbres aren't obscured by keeping the orchestral sections lean and discrete.

Caroline Boissier-Butini’s 6th concerto for piano and flûte obligée, which she herself entitled La Suisse, was inspired by folksongs; the sources do not allow us to date the concerto precisely, but we can assume that it was composed before 1818. A return to folk melodies was entirely in keeping with the times; Beethoven, for example, used such themes, as did Carl Maria von Weber, who was born in the same year as Boissier-Butini. Her innovation, however, is to quote the “ranz des vaches”, the musical themes that would have awakened in her contemporaries an archetypal sense of Switzerland.

Like many musicians, Tim Posner was born into a musical environment. His father is was a violist, and his mother, a cellist, “quite naturally” became his first teacher. Apart from a passing desire to embark on a career as an opera singer – which even led him to play the shepherd boy in Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden! – the prospect of a life dedicated to the cello became clear from the age of thirteen, fuelled in particular by his early discovery of the infinite field of chamber music.