I’ll cut right to the chase. The headline event here is the premiere recording of the Cello Concerto by Enrique Casals (1892-1986, younger brother of the great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals). In musical terms it has significantly more about it than mere curiosity factor: it’s a fine, individual work that grows on you the more you listen, to the extent that, dare I say it, I’ve actually come to prefer it to the Lalo.

Now for the backstory. In 1988 and 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jan Vogler and his brother spent formative summers as students at America’s Marlboro Festival, at that time under the management of Frank Salomon. He gave Vogler some of the CBS Columbia recordings made there during the 1960s by one of its then prominent guests, Pablo Casals, and it was the intensity of the playing on these, not just by Casals himself but also by the young musicians of the festival orchestra, that in 1993 inspired Vogler to found his own Marlboro-modelled Mortizburg Festival in Germany, with a student orchestra led by Catalan conductor Josep Caballé Domenech. Then, in 2000, Domenech turned up at Vogler’s New York apartment with the manuscript of Enrique Casals’s Cello Concerto, written in 1946 for his daughter Pilar but clearly also with his brother Pablo in mind. Fast-forward to 2022 and the pair of them recorded the concerto, plus the Lalo, over three days at the Lukaskirche in Dresden.

As for what we hear on disc, the Casals feels Spanish, to be sure, but it’s late German Romanticism that initially most hits the senses through its noble F major radiance; on to which is soon spritzed a Spanish coastal floral scent – clearly Casals was in his element in his Sant Salvador beach house, where he composed the work. There’s also improvisatory freedom to be appreciated in the music’s shifts of mood, metre and tempo, and the cello-writing overall, which Vogler and the orchestra bring out wonderfully well. The finale is especially enjoyable for its capricious ebb and flow, brass fanfares (Casals clearly bitten by the Wagner and Strauss bug) and col legno and pizzicato colour. Vogler makes the most of all the lines’ inherent lyricism, with a fabulously luminous, mahoganied directness to his tone across his range – and the range is huge, Casals using every inch of the cello, from smouldering depths to high harmonics. The orchestra meanwhile is nimble in its dynamic shifts and goes soaringly, radiantly for the heart-strings in its climaxes. Everywhere and from everyone there’s emotional commitment and a strong soloist-orchestra dynamic. Just one slight caveat to all the above praise is that, when the orchestra has so leapt upon the score’s opportunities for dialogue, I’d occasionally have liked the warm engineering to have lavished some more love upon it – for instance, there’s a Dvořákian first-movement duet between cello and solo flute (8'55") where I’d have enjoyed a little more flute in the balance. But this is nitpicking.

Preface the Casals with a vibrant, tautly expressive, flexible and equally emotionally committed Lalo, serving up some especially satisfying sharp-edged punch and low-register thunder, and both Casals brothers (the album is dedicated to Pablo) have been done more than proud.