The Dutch cellist, Pieter Wispelwey, both live and on disc, has been building a formidable reputation, showing his versatility, switching between historical and modern instruments, equally at home in period and modern style. That comes out in the sampler disc entitled “Styles”, a collection of 16 items ranging from Bach and Vivaldi to Ligeti and Roger Sessions, with two items – movements from Kodaly’s unaccompanied Sonata and Britten’s First Suite – taken from a disc made for the Globe label (12/94). Two Beethoven items are done with fortepiano (though no indication of that is given), the finale of the Op. 69 Sonata as well as of the cello arrangement of the Horn Sonata, Op. 17. The selection ends with another period performance: a fast and furious account of the finale of Haydn’sC major Cello Concerto with Florilegium.
On the new disc Wispelwey plays everything except the concerto using gut strings, adding an extra period touch in the use of harmonium instead of piano for three items – the opening arrangement of the celebrated slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s First Quartet, the Arensky Chant triste (sounding continually as though it is going to turn into the Tchaikovsky song, None but the lonely heart) and Dvorak’s Silent woods. That last is the one one where the use of the harmonium with its squeezy sounds seems a miscalculation, confused rhythmically compared with a performance using piano. The other short Dvorak piece, the Rondo, wittily pointed, is done with piano, as is the Davidov moto perpetuo, At the fountain.
As to the concerto, I thought at first that Wispelwey was using gut strings in that too, for this is a more intimate reading than most on disc, with a narrower dynamic range from the soloist, but with the orchestral tuttis, incisively played, coming over the more sharply in contrast, and helped in that by the recording balance. That Wispelwey uses rather more portamento than usual and brings out autumnal tone colours similar to those in the shorter pieces on gut strings, underlines his concern to present the work in something like period style. If the result is less bitingly dramatic than in a big-scale performance like Heinrich Schiff’s, Wispelwey plays with just as much concentration, rapt, dedicated and warmly expressive. The approach is amply distinctive enough to justify the issue, particularly with a generous coupling which illuminates it so well, not to mention the sampler disc.'