Haydn Cello Concertos Rostropovich

This is a quite extraordinary achievement. Not the least of its merits is that it leaves you loving the music as never before. The orchestra gives splendid support and the sound is warm and ingratiating.

This recording won a Gramophone Award (UK), Diapason d'Or and Choc du Monde de la Musique (France).

Vivaldi is greatly over-rated - a dull fellow who would compose the same form over many times. Such is the opinion of one of the great composers on the music of another great composer. Given the evidence of the present newly re-released complete Vivaldi cello concertos incredulity can be the only response to this assessment. But then Stravinsky was a man who voiced strong, often acerbic and sometimes outrageous opinions on virtually anything suggested to him. He had probably heard few, if any, of these cello concertos and irrespective would it have made any difference?

On Haydn & Mysliveček Cello Concertos, American cellist Wendy Warner, a protégé of Mstislav Rostropovich, and Camerata Chicago, conducted by its British-born founder, Drostan Hall, present Franz Josef Haydn’s essential C Major and D Major Cello Concertos, harmoniously paired with a genuine rarity: the C Major Cello Concerto of Czech composer Josef Mysliveček (1737–1781), a Haydn contemporary.

Shafran became something of a legendary figure amongst cellists. He made a fabled child prodigy debut at ten, playing the Rococo Variations with the Leningrad Philharmonic conducted by Albert Coates. In later years, though, he toured abroad very seldom – making sporadic visits in the 1960s to Rome, New York and London and a succession of visits to Japan where he was immensely popular and had a number of students. Towards the end of his life he gave two celebrated recitals at Wigmore Hall.

After a highly acclaimed recording of Briten’s Cello Symphony (ONYX4058) Pieter Wispelwey and the Flanders Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Seiko Kim, turn to two romantic cello concertos whose neglect is hard to fathom. Lalo, unusually for a French composer in the mid 19th century, was drawn to chamber music, and formed a string quartet (in which he played viola, and later second violin) that championed the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. His passion for chamber music developed to embrace large scale orchestral works – two violin concertos, the famous 'Symphonie espagnole' for violin and orchestra, a symphony in G minor, the Piano Concerto and the concerto recorded here: the Cello concerto in D minor of 1877.