Pieter Wispelwey is an acutely sensitive, impressionable cellist, spontaneously responsive enough to every passing innuendo in Schumann’s concerto to make one marvel that partnership with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (both of which he here also directs) plus the Netherlands Wind Ensemble is so close. Now and again in the first movement I wondered if such detailed inflexion slightly militated against the unity of the whole. But the central Langsam is an intimately personal confession. And I have never heard a more buoyantly – sometimes even cheekily – light-hearted finale, with some outstandingly glistening contributions from the higher wind to brighten the texture – not least in the often criticized, accompanied cadenza.
Despite Schumann’s sanction of the cello as a legitimate alternative, I thought its voice too low to tell in the Op. 73 Fantasiestucke originally designed for clarinet and piano. Surely all five of the Op. 102 Volkston cello pieces (instead of just the second) would have been a more apt inclusion?
But all praise to Wispelwey and his exuberantly committed pianist, Paolo Giacometti, for the rescue of Hindemith’s rarely heard Three Pieces for cello and piano, Op. 8. Here we meet not the austere neo-classicist of later years, but a carefree, youthful eclectic still in search of a definitive style. Anyone could be forgiven for attributing the brief opening “Capriccio” to one of the frolicking Frenchmen of Les Six. The much longer central “Phantasiestuck” betrays the unashamed romanticist hidden behind the sophistication as surely as the equally extended final “Scherzo” does his (often teasingly ‘wrong-key’) attempts to conceal it. In sum, irresistibly engaging. Sponsored, we’re told, by Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the recording combines warmth with clarity.'