Nada Radulovich / Cullan Bryant UNEXPLORED

The four works on UNEXPLORED, offer an expansive variety of musical genres while introducing listeners to previously unrecorded cello repertoire. Premiere recordings of works by Tchaikovsky, Cassadó, Rudnytsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov are presented by cellist Nada Radulovich and pianist Cullan Bryant. 

Tchaikovsky’s Six French Songs, opus 65, dedicated to Madame Desirée Artôt de Padilla, are settings of works of three French poets. The intensity of these poems is amplified by Tchaikovsky’s music. They find a convincing voice in this transcription for cello. Although this is a fully instrumental program, Radulovich provides the only available English translation of this poetry with this album at Navona Records. Published by Ovation Press. 

The passionate and compelling voice of Cassadó (1897-1966) in his Sonata of 1924, deserves to be widely shared and enjoyed . This four movement work is dedicated to Donna Giulietta von Mendelssohn who was said to ‘sing like a mermaid and play the piano like Liszt’ . This compelling work, presented here for the first time, represents various moods and dances. At times poignant, dramatic, playful, or uplifting, it is an effective synthesis of tradition cast in striking harmonic terms.

Romantic Fantasie for Cello and Piano, Op 43, by Ukrainian composer Antin Rudnytsky (1902-1975), displays a conservative 20th-century harmonic language, while exploring the folk idioms of the composer’s native land. The intricate dialogue between the instruments illustrates the composer’s skill at evoking a variety of moods within a single composition. 

One of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s best-known works, The Flight of the Bumblebee, evokes the effortless yet driven path of the tiny insect. This unique transcription of the work was created by pianist Bryant in his effort to remain truer to the original score than previous transcriptions, and was inspired by his years of collaboration with Radulovich.

Mayke Rademakers / Matthijs Verschoor LA FURIA: PASSION, FURY AND MELANCHOLIA

Mayke Rademakers: All my life, I’ve played a lot of Spanish music, and so has my partner and duo-pianist Matthijs Verschoor. Both of us have worked and studied in Spain. And I spent some time immersing myself in Buenos Aires, because I wanted to see the tango with my own eyes: how people perceived it, how they danced it in the streets and on public squares. At a certain point we got this sense of wanting to do something with it. We had a number of works on our repertoire and so we investigated how we could combine them with new pieces, music we still needed to discover, to produce a great CD. We found the music we were looking for. We put together an exciting combination of Spanish and South American music. In a nutshell: flamenco and tango. 

Spanish music takes folk music as its starting point. La Furia is based on that idea. This music is about the heat, the poverty, about lifestyle and passion. La furia literally means anger or aggression. But in Latin, the word has very positive connotations. It means doing what your instincts tell you, acting with passion, giving it your all. The tango flamenco spread from Spain to South America. The tango is truly South American. Although it does show some flamenco influences, the tango definitely found its own form. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the tango is ‘urban’, because it arose in Buenos Aires. The flamenco is ‘rustic’, because it arose in the countryside.

Emmanuelle Bertrand LE VIOLONCELLE AU XXe SIÈCLE

Through these selected masterpieces of the repertoire for solo cello, Emmanuelle Bertrand invites us on a journey to the heart of languages of popular inspiration. When music takes over the idioms characteristic of each culture, pushing back the limits of instrumental technique, reshaping and dismantling the rules the better to express a specific identity, then the cello truly ‘speaks’ and takes us beyond frontiers, where the souls of a people take root.

This title was released for the first time in 2000/11.

Ophélie Gaillard ALVORADA

Alvorada or the invitation to the voyage of cellist Ophélie Gaillard and her magical cello, a musical tour from Spain to Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Cuba) featuring, in particular, the composers Villa-Lobos, Granados, Piazzolla and Jobim. In an exceptional mixture of classical pieces and arrangements of the greatest themes of this intense music, the cello sings with the bandoneon, dances with the piano, guitar or percussion, and abandons itself in amorous intimacy with the voices. Alvorada immerses us in a sound universe where the feverish energy of the rhythms of this Hispanic and South-American music entrances us and from which a sensual nostalgia responds to a dizzying tango. All the senses are aroused when hearing these spellbinding songs and rhythms. The colour of the sun, from dawn to dusk, is found in the clever alternation of these enchanting, universal pieces. All the exceptional musicians (Sabine Devieilhe, Toquinho, Sandra Rumolino, Juanjo Mosalini, Rudi Flores, Emmanuel Rossfelder, Gabriel Sivak…) participating in the Alvorada voyage hypnotize and fascinate us, allowing us to accompany them at every instant in the progression of this dream proposed by Ophélie Gaillard.

Thomas Demenga / Thomas Larcher / Teodoro Anzellotti CHONGURI

Cellist Thomas Demenga offers up a colorful program of encores in Chonguri. From the pizzicato tour de force of the title piece by Sulkhan Tsintsadze, which imitates the selfsame four-stringed instrument of the composer’s native Georgia, it’s clear we’re in for a lively and eclectic treat. Pianist Thomas Larcher accompanies Demenga for most of the program, which includes nods to the familiar and not so. Of the latter, Catalonian composer Gaspar Cassadó’s Danse du diable vert is among the more spirited pins in the album’s geographic and chronographic spread. Two Chopin nocturnes give us a taste of home, in a manner of speaking, with the c-sharp minor presented to us in one of the more beautiful arrangements one is likely to find (though I’ll always be partial to Bela Banfalvi’s). The balance here is superb. A dash of Webern keeps us on our toes, his three Little Pieces sparkling with a charm that is, I daresay, romantic. Of romance we get plenty more in the three Fauré selections sprinkled throughout, of which Après un rêve is a highlight, and in Liszt’s evocative La lugubre gondola.

Four Bach chorales, in Demenga’s arrangements, for which he is joined by accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti form the album’s roof.Sounding somewhere between an organ and a hurdy-gurdy, the sheer depth of tone from Demenga’s cello in these is inspiring.He also offers two pieces of his own, of which the programmatic New York Honk is a delightful end.

Demenga’s playing is such that one can feel the lineage that binds all of this music together into a masterful patchwork as idiosyncratic as it is (seemingly) inevitable. Such programming epitomizes the ECM New Series spirit insofar as it charts the contemporary while paying due respect to the antique in what amounts to one of Demenga’s finest recordings to date and a label landmark. (ECM Reviews)

Alisa Weilerstein SOLO

The long-awaited solo album from Decca’s star cellist sees Weilerstein revealing and revelling in her technique. The American cellist has attracted widespread attention worldwide for her combination of natural virtuosic command and technical precision with impassioned musicianship. The intensity of her playing has regularly been lauded, as has the spontaneity and sensitivity of her interpretations. Committed to expanding the cello repertoire, Alisa is a fervent champion of new music and this release is her first solo album.

Calling for left hand pizzicato as well an alternative tuning of the cello’s lower strings, Kodaly’s Sonata was far ahead of the time in which it was written and explored every facet of the cello, revealing what could be done with this instrument.

Many of Kodaly’s works are based upon Hungarian folksongs & dances, and this theme inspires the rest of the album, with works from the in-vogue Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, across the world to the Chinese composer Bright Sheng.

Sheng’s work is based on seven tunes from China (Seasons, Guessing Song, The Little Cabbage, The Drunken Fisherman, Diu Diu Dong, Pastoral Ballade, Tibetan Dance). Golijov’s Omaramor is a musically playful fantasia inspired by Carols Gardel (the Argentine tango specialist); and Gaspar Cassado’s Suite, consisting of three dance movements, quotes the Kodaly work.