Abby_berner

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.

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.