Cello Britten

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra was Orchestra in Residence at the KlaraFestival 2013 which is known as a modern and international classical music festival far beyond Belgium’s borders. The concerts of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra formed one of the highlights of this year’s festival. Alongside young Greece conductor Teodor Currentzis, who is hailed as an “eccentric super-talented maestro”, the orchestra dedicates its performance to the two composers, contemporaries and friends Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich. The programme includes Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No.1 at whose world premiere in London in 1960 the two composers met for the first time. The orchestra combines one of the most popular cello concertos of the 20th century with Britten’s Sinfonietta and Shostakovich’s Symphony No.1.

Alexander Ramm is the winner of the Silver Medal at the XV Tchaikovsky International Competition, and has garnered prizes at numerous other musical competitions including the Cambridge International Boston Competition, Beijing International Music Competition and the National Music Competition (Moscow). To this day, Mr. Ramm is the only Russian finalist and laureate of the most prestigious Paulo Cello Competition in Helsinki.

This set brings together for the first time Britten's complete Decca recordings as pianist and conductor in which he performs music by other composers - an astonishing variety of music that ranges from large-scale choral works by Bach and Purcell to Schumann and Elgar, as well as orchestral works by Mozart, Haydn and Schubert. Solo vocal repertory is generously represented with important works by Schubert and Schumann and early twentieth-century English song. Chamber music features Britten the pianist in partnership with two of Britten's closest collaborators: Mstislav Rostropovich and Sviatoslav Richter.

Walton's concerto was commissioned by Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, whose reputation as a performer was such that he inspired works by no less than Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Hindemith. Though the concerto was not very well received by critics following its first performance, it is probably the result of Walton's singular aesthetic sensibility and place- perceived as an old-fashioned Romanticism in the post-war period. Wispelwey's performance effortlessly shifts through the strong rhythmic passages and the moments of serenity called for by Walton's composition. The recording also includes three compositions for solo cello: Bloch's Suite no. 1, Ligeti's Sonata for solo cello, and Walton's Passacaglia. The CD is book-ended with Britten's Ciaccona (Cello suite no. 2, op.80) which will clearly establish why Wispelwey is considered one of the foremost Britten interpreters.

"Britten was an outstanding (if reluctant) conductor, and his 1964 account of the with the New Philharmonia traces its course from grief and protest to acceptance with unmatched passion and conviction. And it takes only the fierce opening drumbeats to silence any possible doubts about the age of the recording: it was very good to start with, and it has been expertly remastered. The only conceivable complaint is that the next track follows too quickly, when what is really needed is about a minute of stunned silence."

Anthony Burton, 1001 classical recordings you must hear before you die