Passacaglia Motovilov

Music of extraordinary range and power composed at the dawn of the Space Age, Ronald Stevenson’s 'Passacaglia on DSCH' was long claimed as the biggest single stretch of music ever written for piano. It is a veritable world tour of styles as well as a single-minded exploration of its generating motif, and rising star James Willshire, Who received five-star acclaim in 2011 for his Delphian debut disc of music by Rory Boyle, has the technique and vaulting ambition to match both the work's grandeur and its immense wealth of detail.

In Passacaglia, violinist Pavel Berman and pianist Maria Meerovitch perform two violin sonatas characterised by their contrasting passacaglia finales: Respighi’s Violin Sonata in B minor and Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata in G, Op. 134. Shostakovich’s work was composed for the legendary David Oistrakh, who once owned the violin now played by Berman: a Stradivarius made in Cremona in 1702.

Sándor Veress (1 February 1907 - 4 March 1992) was a Swiss composer of Hungarian origin. He was born in Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, then Austria-Hungary, later Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and died in Bern. The first half of his life was spent in Hungary; the second, from 1949 until his death, in Switzerland, of which he became a citizen in the last months of his life.

Walton's concerto was commissioned by Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, whose reputation as a performer was such that he inspired works by no less than Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Hindemith. Though the concerto was not very well received by critics following its first performance, it is probably the result of Walton's singular aesthetic sensibility and place- perceived as an old-fashioned Romanticism in the post-war period. Wispelwey's performance effortlessly shifts through the strong rhythmic passages and the moments of serenity called for by Walton's composition. The recording also includes three compositions for solo cello: Bloch's Suite no. 1, Ligeti's Sonata for solo cello, and Walton's Passacaglia. The CD is book-ended with Britten's Ciaccona (Cello suite no. 2, op.80) which will clearly establish why Wispelwey is considered one of the foremost Britten interpreters.