Winner of a gold medal at Moscow's 1978 Tchaikovsky Competition, the American cellist, Nathaniel Rosen, now teaches at the Manhattan School of Music as well as regularly giving concerts. His pianist, Doris Stevenson, won high praise from Piatigorsky when playing for his master classes—alongside much else. The two emerge very much as a duo, in basic matters of balance no less than in general musical approach.
For both players Brahms is clearly more romantic than classicist, and not just in the later and riper of the two sonatas. The somewhat more austere E minor work, launched more slowly and ruminatively than we often hear it, is also allowed considerable flexibility of pulse and dynamic shading. Sometimes I even felt Rosen and Stevenson were striving too hard to make every note speak, at the expense of the music's longer, natural flow—detailing the trees, as it were, rather than spontaneously and effortlessly conveying the splendour of the whole wood. But their involvement is unmistakable, and the close-ish recording (in a New York Church) certainly does full justice to Rosen's richly plangent cello.
Though the three miniatures of Schumann's Op. 73 were originally conceived for clarinet, he himself sanctioned violin or cello as acceptable alternatives. I was delighted to find how well they sound from the lower-voiced instrument, not least in allowing us better to appreciate the full charm and skill, in its contrasting sound-world, of the piano part. Both artists are at their imaginatively fanciful best in all three, likewise in Mendelssohn's Op. 109, not poached from the keyboard set but an engaging late (1845) reminder of the lure of his brother, Paul's, cello.'