Orchestre de Paris / Christoph Eschenbach EDITH CANAT DE CHIZY Les Rayons du Jour

LES RAYONS DU JOUR

Emmanuelle Bertrand / Maya Villanueva / Ensemble Syntonia BENOÎT MENUT Les Îles

LES ÎLES

Emmanuelle Bertrand JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Complete Cello Suites

Most recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach's six Cello Suites reflect the highly individualized interpretations of the 20th century masters, which began with Pablo Casals’ innovative explorations, recorded in the late 1930s, and continued decades later in the celebrated readings of Pierre Fournier, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, and many others. However, the movement for period style interpretations on original instruments has given players alternatives to the conventional modern approach; the use of gut strings and a Baroque bow require different techniques and produce fresh sonorities, so the possibilities have been expanded substantially. As the availability of such recordings increases, Emmanuelle Bertrand has added her voice to the historically informed milieu, playing a Carlo Tononi cello from the early 18th century, though she is not primarily known as an early music performer and is better known for her recordings of Romantic and modernist repertoire. Bertrand avoids the strict rhythms or mechanical phrasing sometimes associated with early music performances, and instead infuses the music with a mix of her intellect and personality in a spirit of vigorous spontaneity, knowing when to express deep emotion but always cognizant of the dance styles and expressive expectations of the time, including generous ornamentation and an improvisational freedom with a flexible rubato. This double CD from Harmonia Mundi gives Bertrand a rather intimate recording that works despite the noisy acoustics of the Médiapôle Saint-Césaire in Arles.

Emmanuelle Bertrand CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS Cello Concerto No. 1 - Sonatas Nos. 2 & 3

‘That’s it done at last, this blasted sonata! Will it please or not? That is the question.’ So wrote Saint-Saëns, not without humour, of his second ‘quadruped’ for cello and piano. He adored the cello, as is shown by much more than the famous Swan. He wrote three sonatas for it, but unfortunately the last two movements of the Third Sonata have been lost and what is left survives only in manuscript. Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel play it here with emotion and total respect. The Concerto also included here is today one of the ‘musts’ of the concertante repertory for cello.

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.

Emmanuelle Bertrand / BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Pascal Rophé DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concerto No. 1 - Sonata for Cello and Piano Op. 40

This is one hell of a performance of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto. Emmanuelle Bertrand and conductor Pascal Raphé team up to produce one of the most intense and neurotic versions yet of this intense and neurotic piece. In the outer movements, they adopt fleet tempos that emphasize the music’s twitchy edge, and the engineers daringly balance Bertrand a touch less forward then usual, comfortably within the ensemble. This highlights every mocking grunt and snort of the wind section – listen to the contrabassoon in the first movement’s second subject. It’s unforgettably vivid and to the point. 

The slow movement and ensuing cadenza, by contrast, are intense in a different way: slow, hushed, and grave (save at the anguished climax of the former). I was particularly pleased that Bertrand was able to keep her usually adenoidal breathing in check at the start of the cadenza. Indeed, although a certain amount of huffing and puffing seems to come with the territory in this concerto, Bertrand is no worse than many of her colleagues, and she at least has the excuse of being nakedly expressive to a degree that makes you fear for her mental health. The horn, clarinet, and timpani soloists also are all excellent.

The couplings are interesting and apt, and no less well done. Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata still isn’t all that well known. It dates from the time of the First Piano Concerto, before the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk debacle, and so represents his mature early style. It’s a big, serious, very beautiful piece that both Bertrand and pianist Pascal Amoyel play with the attention to detail that it deserves. The Moderato for cello and piano is a recently discovered fragment that presumably dates from about the same time as the Sonata, and makes an apt encore. Still, it’s the concerto that most lingers in the mind here – it’s just sensational, and may well become your “go to” version of the piece. (David Hurwitz)

Emmanuelle Bertrand DUTILLEUX - LIGETI - BACRI - CRUMB - HENZE

All credit to Emmanuelle Bertrand for choosing an all-20th-century programme for her first solo recital. Its content is as well varied as any, and, since the competition in the works by Crumb, Henze and Ligeti tends to be full-price, she starts with an in-built advantage.
Bertrand is a less seasoned player and a less consistently polished interpreter than Wolfgang Boettcher, whose recent disc, including Henze’s Serenade and Ligeti’s Sonata, is crowned by an imposing account of Dallapiccola’s Ciacona, intermezzo e adagio. She is nevertheless fully equal to the varied technical challenges of her chosen repertory, as her admirably uncontrived performance of George Crumb’s early Sonata shows. In general, Bertrand’s playing in Crumb and Ligeti is less consistently forceful than Pieter Wispelwey’s, and the recording – creditably – is less concerned to project her sound in intense close-up. While her versions of the Henze and the Ligeti are not as freely expressive as Boettcher’s, she impresses in Dutilleux’s brief but telling trilogy, and her advocacy of the Suite No 4 by Nicolas Bacri provides the disc with a substantial novelty.
Bacri (b 1961) is not, on this evidence, a composer of very distinctive personality. He relies on familiar, at times hackneyed, types of instrumental patterning and characterisation to fill out generously proportioned structures, and this 19-minute suite doesn’t really take wing until the last of its five movements. Nevertheless, there’s enough of interest on the disc as a whole to make me hope that more of Bertrand’s playing in the 20th (and 21st) century repertory will soon be made available.' (Gramophone)

Emmanuelle Bertrand LE VIOLONCELLE PARLE

The Harmonia Mundi album Le Violoncelle Parle (The Cello Speaks) takes its name notably from the Pascal Amoyel work for solo cello entitled Itinérance, a slow but evocative work in which the cellist must supplement the cello's own voice with vocalizations from the player him/herself. Beyond that, though, cellist Emmanuelle Bertrand selected her program of well-known works for solo cello as a way of demonstrating her instrument's ability to "speak" and transcend national borders. Her program includes the Russian folk-imbued Third Suite of Benjamin Britten, the Spanish panache and fieriness of Gaspar Cassadó's suite, and finally with the technically taxing and rhythmically exciting Hungarian writing of Zoltan Kodály's Op. 8 Solo Sonata. From start to finish, one thing is abundantly clear: Bertrand is a master of her instrument. Her copious, nearly flawless technique allows her to toss off even the most devilish passages in the Britten and Kodály with seeming ease. Her energies can then be spent on conveying the unique musical styles and languages of each composer, truly allowing her instrument to speak to her listeners. Her sound is magnificently rich and voluminous, and Harmonia Mundi's recorded sound gives listeners a dynamic front-row seat filled with vigorous finger-falls and punctuated breathing. (Mike D. Brownell)