Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata

The prize here is the Rachmaninoff cello sonata, a warm, hyper-Romantic musical tapestry that gives both the pianist and cellist a major workout. Ma is a superb chamber-music player, as is Ax. Both offer the kind of artistic give-and-take that a great performance of this music requires, while neither weighs the music down with excessive indulgence. The Prokofiev, a very different sort of musical beast, is a much lighter work, but it's done no less well. This is one of Ma's best chamber-music discs.

In an album celebrating the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff's birth, cellist John-Henry Crawford and pianist Victor Santiago Asuncion explore the voice-like qualities of the composer's melodies. The cello's expressive timbres are often likened to the human voice, making it the perfect vehicle to showcase this aspect of Rachmaninoff's output.The release begins with an arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Elegie - originally for solo piano - that expands the work's texture to articulate a more clearly defined melodic line.

Poulenc's Cello Sonata is technically demanding for every cellist. Since he had a great affinity for woodwind instruments, his notation is not really tailored to the requirements of a string instrument. He himself was aware of this fact, so he sought expert advice on the composition from the famous cellist Pierre Fournier, who was also the dedicatee and soloist of the premiere in 1948. “Everything we see, hear and touch is connected with feeling.” This is how Leoš Janáček defined his artistic attitude, from which an idiosyncratic musical language emerged that was hardly comparable to other models or traditions of his time. Pohádka means - translated from Czech - “fairy tale”. The model is a fairy tale written by the Russian romantic Wassiliy Shukovskj (1783–1852) about the love of a prince for a princess. This choice of topic shows Janáček's enthusiasm for Russian culture.

This new recording (recorded in 2012) brings together two great, but altogether different 20th century Cello Sonatas from Russia: the gorgeous and deeply romantic cello sonata by Rachmaninoff, of near‐symphonic proportions, and the cello sonata by Prokofiev, a hybrid piece of his later period, a fascinating mixture of the romantic, the grotesque and the introspective side of the multi-faceted composer..