Elgar 85 Cello

Making her debut on Decca, Alisa Weilerstein presents three major works of the cello repertoire with Daniel Barenboim leading the Staatskapelle Berlin. The star vehicle, naturally, is Edward Elgar's Concerto in E minor, which Weilerstein plays with commanding presence, rich tone, and emotional depth. Most listeners will be drawn primarily to this performance because of the piece's familiarity, and Weilerstein's charisma and passionate playing make it the album's main attraction. Yet listeners should give Weilerstein and Barenboim credit for following the Elgar with an important if not instantly recognizable or approachable modernist work, Elliott Carter's powerful Cello Concerto. Weilerstein is quite bold to play this intensely dramatic and angular composition, and while it's unlikely to appeal to the majority of fans who adore the Elgar, it deserves its place on the program for its seriousness and extraordinary displays of solo and orchestral writing. To close, Weilerstein plays Max Bruch's Kol Nidrei, a Romantic work that returns the program to a mellow and melancholy mood and brings the CD to a satisfying close. Decca's reproduction is excellent, putting Weilerstein front and center with full resonance, but not leaving the vibrant accompaniment of the orchestra too far behind her.

The much-anticipated album from a brilliant young American cellist marks one of the most exciting Decca Classics debuts in many years. The conductor Daniel Barenboim has been a fervent supporter of Alisa Weilerstein’s extraordinary talent since he accompanied her in Elgar’s Concerto as part of the 2010 Europa Concert in Oxford, broadcast on TV across Europe. Together, they have made a recording of searing intensity.

For this 2016 Hyperion release, cellist Steven Isserlis and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Paavo Järvi present a moving album of cello concertos by Edward Elgar and William Walton, along with Gustav Holst's Invocation and Imogen Holst's The Fall of the Leaf, a five-movement suite for solo cello. The program creates a profoundly pensive and even autumnal feeling, and Isserlis' tone is by turns reflective, lyrical, and poignantly elegiac, appropriate to the selections. The melancholy nostalgia of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor colors the album's mood from the outset, and notwithstanding passages of intense virtuosity, the rich but subdued sonorities of his burnished orchestration contribute to its brooding quality.

Not since Yo-yo made his recording back in 1990 has there been such power and precision displayed in a recording of the Barber Cello Concerto, and she practically glides through phrases where other famous soloists (I'm looking at you, Kirschbaum) struggle to stay afloat. My favorite and, dare I say, the definitive performance of my favorite cello concerto.

These two masterpieces are shadowed by the events of the First World War. Elgar’s Cello Concerto, an intensely poignant, reflective and individual musical statement, has enjoyed unflagging popularity among musicians and listeners for over 100 years. By contrast, Frank Bridge’s Oration (Concerto elegiaco) remained unperformed for decades after its early hearings. Yet it shares spiritual affinities with Elgar’s work and serves as a funeral address of huge solemnity and narrative power in its outcry against the futility of war.

Although conceived by utterly divergent characters in lands and times that engender few similarities these days, the cello concertos by Elgar and Myaskovsky make a fascinating coupling due not only to the disparate nature of the composers’ lives and situations, but also, curiously, to the common ground they tread. Both men were in their early sixties when writing what was their only concertante work for the instrument, and the prevailing mood of both concertos is one of aristocratic wistfulness married to a mastery of form and rhetoric. They strike the listener almost as elegies, predominantly ruminant and rarely displaying the cut-and-thrust heroics that are so often an integral part of the concerto genre.

The tragedy of du Pré’s brief career is still fresh in the public memory and can be summarised here. She was born in Oxford on 26 January 1945 into a middle-class family in which music was important: her mother was a fine pianist and a gifted teacher. The French-sounding name came from her father’s Channel Islands ancestry. Just before her fifth birthday, when she was already showing musical promise, she heard the sound of a cello on the radio and the course of her life was set.