Socalled

Launching their complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, the Cuarteto Casals present this first installment featuring initial examples of the genre from each of the three key periods in the composer’s career: his formative years, the socalled ‘heroic’ middle period and that of his artistic maturity. The ingenious juxtaposition reveals how his superhuman struggle for perfection informed a musical language of breathtaking originality in tandem with a depth of expression without precedent in this genre, of which Beethoven is the uncontested master.

Matt Haimovitz’s multi-faceted cello knocks down musical boundaries while scaling emotions from darkness to joy in Cello JAZZ, a wide-ranging playlist featuring some of Haimovitz’s hottest collaborators. Classics like Billy Strayhorn’s haunting Blood Count, George Gershwin’s languid Liza, and Miles Davis’s bebop Half Nelson are reborn in inventive arrangements by modern master David Sanford, who contributes his own big band cello concerto, Scherzo Grosso, and the intense Seventh Avenue Kaddish, a solo tour-de-force. Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango and DJ Olive’s dreamy Trans resonate alongside the “brilliantly inventive” (The New York Times) AKOKA, with stellar clarinetist David Krakauer, and the jubilant musical playground of Aaron Jay Kernis’s First Club Date. Peak bliss is unlocked with two John McLaughlin tracks from the Grammy-nominated Meeting of the Spirits, with Haimovitz’s maverick band of cello warriors, Uccello.

The flute playing of Patrick Gallois epitomizes several of the prime virtues of the French flute tradition; fine-spun liquidity of tone, delectable phrasing and exemplary breath control, and, when required, the ability to project and capture the attention of the listener, even across full blown orchestral tuttis. But these qualities aside, Gallois is an artist of evident distinction and innate musicality, and I have no hesitation in commending this new recording of works by Rodrigo and Khachaturian to any collector, who, like myself, may have only a limited appetite for the flute!