The links, both musical and personal, between Grieg and Delius are many, which makes this a very apt and attractive coupling, bringing together all the works each composer wrote for this medium. This is Julian Lloyd Webber’s second recording of the Delius Cello Sonata. His earlier version – made in 1981 – was with Eric Fenby for Unicorn-Kanchana, and is coupled on CD with the three Delius violin sonatas. The contrasts are fascinating. The overall duration this time is almost two minutes shorter, and the easier flow goes with a lighter manner and a less forward balance for the cello.
The result in this freely lyrical single-movement structure is more persuasive, less effortful, with greater light and shade, and with just as much warmth in the playing. In that Lloyd Webber is splendidly matched – as he is throughout the disc – by the playing of Bengt Forsberg, best known for accompanying his compatriot, the mezzo, Anne-Sofie von Otter, not least in their Gramophone Award-winning disc of Grieg songs (DG, 6/93). Here Forsberg’s variety of expression and idiomatic feeling for rubato consistently match those of his partner. The Caprice and Elegy of 1930, originally dictated to Fenby, much slighter pieces with obsessively repetitious phrases, like the Hassan Serenade, inspire equally free and spontaneous performances, and it is particularly good to have the tuneful Romance of 1898, written in Paris, which inexplicably remained neglected for 80 years till Lloyd Webber revived it.
The Grieg Sonata, too, among the most inspired and intense of his longer works, prompts magnetic playing, again with more light and shade than is common, helped by not having the cello spotlit in a natural recording acoustic. The mystery of the very opening is intensified, and the pianissimos from both cellist and pianist are daringly extreme, especially so in the central slow movement with its haunting quotation from Grieg’s Sigurd Jorsalfar “Homage March”. The lyrical Intermezzo provides an attractive makeweight. Though a very high proportion of the music here is reflective, the meditative intensity of the playing sustains it well. The booklet contains a delightful photo of Delius with Grieg and his wife as well as Halvorsen and Sinding, all playing cards.'