The Cello in Wartime
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Ivor Novello, Traditional, Camille Saint-Saëns, (Charles) Hubert (Hastings) Parry, Anton Webern, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Frank Bridge
Genre:
Chamber
Label: BIS
Magazine Review Date: 12/2017
Media Format: Super Audio CD
Media Runtime: 65
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: BIS2312
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Sonata for Cello and Piano |
Claude Debussy, Composer
Claude Debussy, Composer Connie Shih, Piano Steven Isserlis, Cello |
Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 1 |
Gabriel Fauré, Composer
Connie Shih, Piano Gabriel Fauré, Composer Steven Isserlis, Cello |
(3) Little Pieces |
Anton Webern, Composer
Anton Webern, Composer Connie Shih, Piano Steven Isserlis, Cello |
(Le) Carnaval des animaux, 'Carnival of the Animals', Movement: The swan |
Camille Saint-Saëns, Composer
Camille Saint-Saëns, Composer Connie Shih, Piano Steven Isserlis, Trench Cello |
Jerusalem |
(Charles) Hubert (Hastings) Parry, Composer
(Charles) Hubert (Hastings) Parry, Composer Connie Shih, Piano Steven Isserlis, Trench Cello |
Keep the Home fires burning (till the boys come ho |
Ivor Novello, Composer
Connie Shih, Piano Ivor Novello, Composer Steven Isserlis, Trench Cello |
God Save the King |
Traditional, Composer
Connie Shih, Piano Steven Isserlis, Trench Cello Traditional, Composer |
Author: Richard Bratby
It’s actually a ‘holiday cello’, manufactured somewhere around 1900 – a portable, rectangular cello that can be dismantled and packed down into its own soundbox. But similar instruments are known to have been cobbled together in the trenches, and this one saw service at Ypres with its former owner, Harold Triggs. Isserlis is clearly taken with what he calls its ‘shy, soft tone’: there’s a viola-like reticence to its sound that gives an affecting sweetness to Isserlis and Shih’s performances of miniatures that they imagine might have been played by Triggs to entertain his comrades at the Front.
But Isserlis is back on his Strad for the four main works, and there’s no reticence about Shih’s playing either. In keeping with the wartime theme, these are passionate, red-blooded performances – the Debussy, in particular, is a thing of rich oils and dark charcoal. Isserlis’s top notes have an almost human quality; eerie cries punctuate each of these works, as well as moments of jagged dissolution. Isserlis and Shih think and move alike. There’s a tragic grandeur to the still underrated Bridge Sonata (even the moments of rapture are anything but careless), and an air of suppressed tension throughout the Fauré. Webern’s microscopic Three Pieces are wonderfully ominous: another unexpected moment on an imaginative and superbly realised disc.
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