Music Daniel Muller Schott Kullek

Anne-Sophie Mutter is joined in by André Previn and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott for these performances of the finest of Mozart's Piano Trios, filmed in Mantua's magnificent 18th-century Teatro Bibiena. "The outstanding musicians making music in an affectionate and elegant way" (International Record Review). "Mutter's warm tone and her subtle gradations of vibrato are a constant pleasure" (BBC Music Magazine).

Among Mendelssohn's considerable chamber music output, the works for cello and piano had a special place for the composer. Although he was not himself a cellist, his brother Paul was an accomplished amateur and Mendelssohn likely kept him in mind when composing the three larger-scale works. Following in the footsteps of Beethoven, Mendelssohn continued to move more toward an equal partnership between the two instruments. By the time he composed the D major Sonata in 1843, a true feeling of cello sonata as opposed to a sonata for piano and cello was achieved. This Orfeo album features cellist Daniel Müller-Schott and pianist Jonathan Gilad.

It is not by chance that luminous textures and sensual orchestral colors are considered essential features of French music. Its history features great names renowned for their art of instrumentation and sensitive use of timbres, who include the composers of the cello concertos on this recording: Camille Saint-Saëns, whose instrumentation technique always combines color with transparency, Édouard Lalo, who was highly esteemed by Claude Debussy for the wealth of color in his works, and Arthur Honegger, who painted striking soundscapes not only in his Cello Concerto but in his works without a large orchestra as well. Often it is the fine shadings and delicate transitions that characterize the tone colors of French music and are responsible for its delightful charm. Daniel Müller-Schott – Opus Klassik award winner 2019 – appealingly combines five works from the French sound kaleidoscope on his newest album with the DSO Berlin and Alexandre Bloch ‘Four Visions of France’.

If you're going to record the fiendishly difficult and vibrant violin and cello concertos of Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, magnificently clean, virtuosic, and sensitive performances are absolutely essential for soloists and orchestra alike. Fortunately, that is precisely what is achieved on this recording featuring violinist Arabella Steinbacher, cellist Daniel Muller-Schott, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Is violinist Julia Fischer in the same league as David Oistrakh in her recording of Brahms' Violin Concerto? Are Fischer and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott in the same league as Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich in their recording of Brahms' Double Concerto? No: Oistrakh and Rostropovich are playing big, muscular, and heroic music while Fischer and Müller-Schott are playing intimate, sensuous, and lyrical music. Fischer's tone is lovely, her technique is impeccable, but best of all his interpretation of the Violin Concerto is sweet, smiling, and joy-filled. Müller-Schott's tone is warm, his technique is impressive, but best of all his interpretation of the Double Concerto with Fischer sounds like a love duet from an Othello written by a German.

During his long and exceptionally fruitful creative life, Richard Strauss (18641949) composed only a few works for the cello. Only three have survived and small as that number may seem, those cello works are critical to the composers development. Daniel Müller-Schott sees the early Sonata for cello and piano op. 6 and the late tone poem Don Quixote op. 35 as marking the path that was to lead Strauss within the space of a few years from Romanticism to the Modern era in music. The cellist highlights this watershed in Strausss artistic development with his own transcriptions, expressly made for this CD, of the Lieder Zueignung op. 10/1 and Ich trage meine Minne op. 32/1.

In 2006, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth plus the 30th anniversary of Anne-Sophie Mutter's public debut, Deutsche Grammophon released new recordings of the German violinist in all the Austrian composer's major works featuring her instrument. To celebrate Mutter's undeniable beauty, each body of works was released with a different photograph of Mutter on the cover: the set of concertos had Mutter poured into a stunning bottle green mermaid gown, the set of sonatas had Mutter wrapped in a shimmering golden yellow strapless gown, and this set of the piano trios has Mutter's wonderfully made-up face and marvelously coifed hair in close-up.