Raphael Wallfisch Bloch

These five works, covering the range from Bloch's student days in Brussels and through his first decades in the USA, bear witness to a fertile and expanding imagination. Central to any survey of Bloch must be the so-called ""Jewish"" music which occupied him for just a decade around the time of the First World War and into the 20s and which includes his greatest and most popular score, Schelomo - Rhapsodie hébraïque for cello and orchestra from 1916. He did not invent the style, however, nor did he always inhabit this world, as evinced by the early Sonate and the big Suite 1919, neither of which could be labelled ""Jewish"".

Through a series of new recordings with CPO, cellist Raphael Wallfisch goes on a personal journey to rediscover the forgotten cello music of exiled Jewish composers who escaped Fascism and the Third Reich. The series will include premiere recordings of cello concerti by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Weigl and Reizenstein, and Bloch’s Symphony for Cello and Orchestra. With conductor Nicholas Milton, Wallfisch has joined forces with the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra and Deutschland Radio. This is the first release in the series, featuring the works of Hans Gal and Castelnuovo Tedesco.

The deep resonant and eloquent sound of the cello is able to express the widest to passionately singing. The first cello concertos were written in the Baroque, when the instrument shed its modest role as part of the continuo setting. During the Classical and Romantic era surprisingly concertos were written, while the 20th century yielded some of the greatest masterworks in the genre. The set contains concertos by Vivaldi, Platti, Porpora, Monn, C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, Boccherini, Leo, Schumann, Saint-Saens, Dvorak, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Finzi, Lalo, Bruch, Faure, Bloch, Ginastera, Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, Lutoslawski.