Ensemble Resonaz Cello Concertos

This album marks the solo debut of Ensemble Diderot cellist Gulrim Choi and contains several World Premiere Recordings. Faithful to the values of the ensemble, she looks at a facet of a repertoire that has been neglected over time.

Giovanni Benedetto Platti left his home country Italy and settled in the wealthy environment of the Würzburg court, where he became an esteemed soloist, singer and composer. Platti’s music, firmly rooted in the Italian Baroque style of Corelli and Vivaldi, shows an exceptional depth of feeling and a “personal touch”, quite unlike some of the thirteen‐to‐the‐dozen works of some of his contemporaries.

Moving from the style galant to the Age of Revolutions, this album is an invitation to discover half a century of the cello concerto’s history. A few years after a sensational first volume devoted to C. P. E. Bach, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Riccardo Minasi and Ensemble Resonanz pay tribute to the hypersensitivity of the cello and honour with panache the transcendental virtuosity of the unjustly overlooked Antonín Kraft!

The essence of Camille Saint-Saëns' music comes through perhaps most clearly in his music for solo instrument and orchestra, which exemplifies his elegant combination of melody and conservatory-generated virtuosity. The two cello concertos are here, plus a pair of crowd-pleasing short works for piano and orchestra, and the evergreen Carnival of the Animals, with pianists Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier joining forces along with a collection of instruments that includes the often-omitted glass harmonica. There are all kinds of attractions here: the gently humorous and not over-broad Carnival, the songful cello playing of Truls Mørk, and the little-known piano-and-orchestra scene Africa, Op. 89, with its lightly Tunisian flavor (sample this final track). But really, the central thread connecting them all is the conducting of Neeme Järvi and the light, graceful work of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra; French music is the nearly 80-year-old Järvi's most congenial environment, and in this recording, perhaps his last devoted to Saint-Saëns, he has never been better.

Following his attractive performance of six of Vivaldi's cello sonatas, Christophe Coin has recorded six of the composer's 24 or so concertos for the instrument. Five of these, Michael Talbot tells us in an interesting accompanying note, probably belong to the 1720s while the sixth, the Concerto in G minor (RV416), is evidently a much earlier work. Coin has chosen, if I may use the expression somewhat out of its usual context, six of the best and plays them with virtuosity and an affecting awareness of their lyrical content. That quality, furthermore, is not confined to slow movements but occurs frequently in solo passages of faster ones, too. It would be difficult to single out any one work among the six for particular praise. My own favourite has long been the happily spirited Concerto in G major (RV413) with which Coin ends his programme. Strongly recommended. (Gramophone Magazine)

Boccherini's stature as a great composer stands chiefly on his works for cello - these concertos, the cello sonatas, and above all the quintets for two violins, viola, and two cellos. The two performances by Tim Hugh and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, produced by Naxos, may not set the bar for interpretive brilliance, but Mr. Hugh plays beautifully, with excellent tone in his highest passages, and the price is right. If you haven't given Boccherini a listener's chance, these two CDs, sold separately, might open your ears.

This album features cello concertos by Witold LutosIawski and Henri Dutilleux performed by the multiple prize-winning German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, conducted by Thomas Sondergard. These works, premiered in 1970, are two of the biggest gems of the twentieth century, the golden age of the cello. While equally virtuosic and engaging, both pieces showcase different aspects of the musical landscape of the late twentieth century.

Young cellist Han-Na Chang, Korean-born and trained in the U.S. by Mstislav Rostropovich, is a newcomer to Baroque music, having released a mixture of cello classics and late-Romantic and contemporary concertos up to this time. Here she delivers a set of seven Vivaldi cello concertos that Rostropovich himself might have helped her shape; it's something of a throwback to the way Vivaldi was played 30 or 40 years ago.