Cellists come in three general varieties, I often think: lugubrious, slithery, or chaste. Lugubrious cellists wrestle their instruments with bear claws, heave about in bardic misery and adjust the weight of the world with pregnant pauses. Rostropovich comes to mind, and du Pré. Slithery cellists, on the other hand, are fleet and scrape-less, all about elision and dazzling uplift on glycerin-coated wings—think Heinrich Schiff or Christian Poltéra. Then we have the chaste: cellists pure-of-tone, reserved, smooth, aristocratic. János Starker comes to mind, and now the simply gorgeous playing of Strasbourg-born Marc Coppey, worthy successor to his teacher, who brings us the most enjoyable, quietly artful version of Schelomo I know.

It’s hard to recall Ernest Bloch was once a popular Swiss/American Jewish composer. Bloch held grandiose convictions about his talents and what we’d call his DNA, and thought himself the inner source of a future Hebraic musical style for Palestine. Later becoming an American immigrant, Bloch was convinced he could replace the U.S. national anthem with his rhapsody America. He failed to do either. But he did certainly anticipate Cecil B. DeMille.

These days we’re lucky to hear Baal Shem or run into a chamber orchestra performing one of the two concerti grossi. But listen with care to Schelomo, written in 1916, and you encounter influences others picked up from him, a sure sign of how seriously Bloch was once taken. In fact, ask me quickly what Schelomo sounds like, and I’m tempted to say “Jewish Respighi.” There’s an ostinato melody for two bassoons which Bloch uses as contrast in the middle of the piece. It’s a Jewish childhood tune his mother used to sing. Start humming and you can imagine how easily it might evoke a few years later the pulsating grandeur of catacombs in Respighi’s The Pines of Rome. There are several massive climaxes in Schelomo. One of them winds down in a manner suggestive of the first movement of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, written decades later. So everyone was certainly paying attention, it would seem.

And well they should, here. This is the first fully hysteria-free interpretation I’ve heard. Schelomo, the cello’s voice, represents biblical King Solomon, and Bloch’s music portrays the crashing of Solomon’s world through vanity. Bloch witnessed the same thing happening to the Europe he knew, then busy slaughtering itself in World War I—message enough. But ever since World War II, you get the impression that Schelomo must have been about the Holocaust (which it could not have anticipated), and it’s usually played for fingernail-edged intensity and glass-shattering anxiety. Munch and Piatigorsky nearly burn a hole in the stage with their classic 1950s rendition. Not here: This performance is so refined and beautiful, it could nearly be Fauré. Kirill Karabits and Marc Coppey are very much on the same page, with little agogic rubato and everything smoothly dovetailed. For the first time, I really like Schelomo as music, not message.

Coppey and Karabits’s refined approach leads to a different sort of Dvořák Cello Concerto than we often hear, of course, a touch understated. An interesting comparison is to be had with a CD released by the Deutsches SO three years ago for BIS, with cellist Christian Poltéra and Thomas Dausgaard conducting. Dausgaard is an original, intuitive musician who has a remarkable way of bouncing forward and finding flecks of light in inner voices. And Poltéra is an impassioned cellist who “slithers.” The Deutsches Symphony plays beautifully for both conductors, but you can guess I find Dausgaard more exciting. Nonetheless, Coppey keeps growing on one here. And Karabits achieves a kind of temperamental perfection. We have quite a wonderful release before us, when all is said and done, and the lyrical, gentle Silent Woods is just the right sort of complement from Dvořák’s pen to Marc Coppey’s more chaste instincts. Audite’s sound is as good as BIS’s, but with the cello presented slightly more forward. It amuses me to note what must be the principal French horn in both performances play his big first movement solo with very un-German vibrato, but with no harm done. Be sure to hear this.

New recordings of Dvořák’s B-Minor Cello Concerto continue apace, but it has been quite a while since a new recording of Bloch’s “Hebraic Rhapsody,” Schelomo, has come my way. The piece doesn’t seem to be as popular as it once was. In a not too distant review of Marc Coppey performing cellos concertos by Haydn and C. P. E. Bach (39:6), I suggested that the cellist’s manner of address might be better suited to repertoire of the Romantic period which he has recorded before, namely works by Grieg, Richard Strauss, Maurice Emmanuel, and Théodore Dubois. And as if right on cue, here Coppey is in two mainstream masterpieces of the Romantic cello literature.

I may have been a bit unkind to Bloch’s Schelomo in a performance by Truls Mørk in 28:6, when I referred to the “Ben-Hur, Hollywood kitsch” aspects of the score. It’s true—and the composer admitted as much—that the “Jewish character of the work was not achieved using ancient melodies.” Bloch was, however, deeply moved and inspired by the book of Ecclesiastes, authorship of which is attributed to the aged King Solomon, who, as an old and despairing man, had seen the follies of life and concluded, in pessimism and sorrow, that “All is vanity.”

According to Bloch, the idea for Schelomo actually had its beginnings in 1915 in sketches for a large choral-orchestral setting of the Ecclesiastes text. But he wasn’t fluent in Hebrew and the translations into German, French, and English just didn’t seem to work. It wasn’t until Bloch met the cellist Alexander Barjansky that his path forward became clear. Solomon would speak not in words but in a language more immediate, direct, and understandable by audiences of diverse languages and dialects. Schelomo would be a portrait of the ancient king—represented by the solo cello—recalling and commenting on the swirl of events and experiences—represented by the orchestra—that shaped his life and led him to his profound loss of faith in humanity.

As booklet note author Habakuk Traber points out, “Schelomo is the only piece in Bloch’s oeuvre to have a dark ending.” But Traber didn’t need to tell us that; Bloch tells us that himself: “Even the darkest of my works end with hope. This work alone concludes in a complete negation, but the subject demands it!” And no wonder. The work was completed in 1916 while the composer and his family were still in Geneva during some of the darkest days of World War I. By the following year, Bloch had emigrated to the U.S., and Schelomo received its first performance on May 3, 1917 in Carnegie Hall. The soloist was Hans Kindler, principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski, and the concert was conducted by Artur Bodanzky.

Dvořák’s B-Minor Cello Concerto is so familiar on record and on concert stages across the globe that it needs no introduction. The album note does observe, however, that in at least one way Dvořák’s concerto is a mirror image of Bloch’s Schelomo. Where Bloch’s work was composed in Europe but premiered in the U.S., Dvořák’s score was composed mainly in New York during the composer’s time in America, but its ending was revised slightly when Dvořák returned home to Prague, and the work was premiered in London. Why that particular polarity of place of composition vs. place of first performance makes Bloch’s Schelomo and Dvořák’s concerto birds of a feather I’m not sure, but they do make satisfying discmates.

Unfortunately, I wish satisfying was a word I could use to describe the performances or say that they merit the excellent program note and recording afforded them, but compared to the many outstanding contenders in both works, these hardly rise above the mediocre. In much of the technically difficult passagework, cellist Marc Coppey sounds labored, and even in relaxed moments of lyrical calm his tone, which is a bit on the grainy side to begin with, is not the loveliest I’ve heard. But Coppey’s technical and tonal shortcomings are minor beside Kirill Karabits’s lackadaisical conducting and the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin’s lapses in good behavior. The orchestra’s horns, it seems, have a problem sustaining notes of any significant duration without wavering, and their intonation in places is suspect as well. On top of that, there’s some lack of coordination both between and within sections of the orchestra in all-out ensemble passages, as towards the end of the first movement of the Dvořák. It makes for a somewhat muddy-sounding melee, which I attribute to Karabits’s inattention to detail and discipline. These are not works that play themselves without strong leadership from the podium. Previous reviews of Karabits in these pages have been generally quite positive, but I notice that they are all with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble he has led as principal conductor since 2009. This, as far as I know, is his first and only recording with the Berlin-based German Symphony Orchestra, so maybe this was a case of conductor and musicians getting to know each other.

Someone once quipped about lawyers that there are so many of them if you laid them out end to end it would be a good thing. I don’t know that it would necessarily be a good thing if you laid out all the recordings of Dvořák’s B-Minor Cello Concerto end to end, but I do know there are so many of them it would make for a fairly long walk to get to the front of the line. And who would you find when you got there? Well, that’s debatable, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be Coppey and Karabits.

As for Schelomo, the line isn’t nearly as long, so it’s a bit easier to pick a leader among the pack. Apart from Zara Nelsova’s classic efforts with Abravanel and Ansermet, I very much liked Truls Mørk’s performance when I reviewed it in 28:6. I felt that he gave us a portrait of an older and wiser Solomon than the one who had a youthful dalliance with the Queen of Sheba. But I also still find the version by Steven Isserlis with Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra compelling. I don’t think this effort by Marc Coppey and Kirill Karabits earns a place at the head of the line for either the Bloch or the Dvořák.

Most likely, just ahead of this review, you will find my review of Brahms’s two string quintets performed by the Chamber Players of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne on a downloaded Pentatone release. Comparing those performances to the ones by the Mandelring Quartet with violist Roland Glassl just two issues ago in 40:5, I came down strongly in favor of the Mandelring. Now, just two issues later, we have the Mandelring Quartet, once again with Roland Glassl playing second viola, and now joined by Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt playing second cello, in Brahms’s two string sextets, making for a beautiful companion to the previous release.

Contrasts between the quintets and the sextets are interesting. For one, the two sextets—op. 18 in B♭ Major (1860), and op. 36 in G Major (1864–65)—are fairly early works in Brahms’s canon; whereas the two quintets—in F Major, op. 88 (1882), and op. 111 in G Major (1890)—are fairly late works. The G-Major Quintet was, in fact, to have been Brahms’s sign-off before taking early retirement, but his encounter less than a year later with clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld quickly put an end to his plans for holing up at that cabin on the lake.

For the most part, the quintets are sunny, companionable works that reflect the feeling of a man who has resolved his life’s conflicts and who is at peace with himself. The sociable surfaces of the quintets, however, tend to mask the complex contrapuntal and rhythmic mechanics of the writing which now, after a lifetime, have become second nature to Brahms. The much earlier sextets exude feelings of contentment as well, but they’re also filled with youthful ardor and a sense of impatience common to young men feeling their oats. These are not works that are necessarily relaxed or comfortable in their own skin. One has the impression of music trying to break free of its constraints. Listen, for example, to the incredible variations in the second movement of the Sextet No. 1. In the maelstrom of the third variation in particular, it sounds like the notes are being sucked up right off the page into the vortex of the whirlwind.

It’s noteworthy that Brahms’s first efforts at composing for strings alone were not quartets, or even quintets, but sextets. He reveled in the extra richness and depth that a second viola and second cello offered. The idea of a string sextet wasn’t exactly new, but it was rather risky, for Brahms was resurrecting a type of work that, with few exceptions, hadn’t been much heard since Boccherini.

The Mandelring Quartet, here with Roland Glassl and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt, gives warm, spirited, probing, penetrating, and highly clarifying performances of Brahms two string sextets. Much the same could be said of the Cypress Quartet’s readings with Barry Shiffman and Zuill Bailey, reviewed as recently as 40:5, not to mention a number of others that have earned strong recommendations in these pages. What perhaps gives the Mandelring a bit of an edge, in addition to the excellent performances and recording, is that, as noted above, this makes a very nice companion to the ensemble’s very recent and equally excellent release of Brahms’s two string quintets.

Rachel Barton Pine’s superbly played—with imaginative ornamentation—and glowingly recorded solo Bach goes to the head of the class and should reconcile devotees of period and modern performance (she plays with a Baroque bow on a modernized Guarneri).

Don’t think you’ll ever like Bach in English? You might change your mind after hearing Chandos’s new recording of Neil Jenkins’s brilliant English translation of the St John Passion. It’s a revelation, with committed performances all around.

The splendid debut disc of the ensemble The Vivaldi Project highlights lesser known string trios from the galant and Classical eras, played in vibrant style.

Naxos’s recording of a pastiche Mass assembled by conductor Franz Hauk from movements by Donizetti and his teacher Johann Simon Mayr suggests that the liturgical output of the bel canto composers is due for a reappraisal. Religious music that is engagingly human and colorful, it deserves to be taken seriously.

It’s rare to find so much of Stravinsky’s violin music under one roof, and Russian violinist Liliana Gourdjia’s thoughtful performances offer a perfect combination of Russian fire classical poise.

This has been another bumper-crop year of new releases from which I could easily have selected twice the allowed number of entries for my 2017 Want List. It’s the weeding-out that’s always hard. Or, as Brahms is reputed to have once said, “Composing is easy; it’s letting the superfluous notes slip under the table.” I wouldn’t characterize any of my runners-up as superfluous. In fact, I think they deserve honorable mention, even if they did get cut from the final list of five.

Here are the also-rans, why I initially considered them, and why I reluctantly ended up eliminating them:
[…] It certainly can’t be said that Saint-Saëns is an obscure or neglected composer, but his chamber works in particular haven’t fared all that well on record. And that is why a new release on Audite by the Quartetto di Cremona playing Saint-Saëns’s Piano Quintet in A Minor and String Quartet in E Minor in exhilarating performances earns a place on my 2017 Want List for some of the best chamber music-making I’ve heard this year.

Emanating from performances at two Lucerne Festivals on 8/19/1961 (the Mozart Concerto with Casadesus) and 9/8/1962 (the Brahms Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic), these recordings have been released in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of Carl Schuricht, who died in 1967. If Audite’s documentation and Bernard Jacobson’s headnote to a 24:5 review of another Casadesus/Schuricht performance of the same Mozart concerto are both right, then it appears that pianist and conductor bar-hopped from Lucerne to Salzburg, where just four days later, on 8/23/1961, they performed the same concerto at the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic. One wonders if they showed up at the Strasbourg Festival next, like fraternity bros going from one keg party to another.

Fifteen months after Casadesus made this appearance in Lucerne—and presumably the one in Salzburg, both with Schuricht—the pianist sat down in Cleveland’s Severance Hall in November 1962 to record Mozart’s final concerto with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra under the baton of George Szell; and as the reader is sure to know, that collaboration was not a one-off. Indeed, between 1959 and 1962, Casadesus teamed up with Szell to record all but a handful of Mozart’s piano concertos beginning with No. 12. Conspicuously missing from the later concertos are the Nos. 19 and 25. Some of concertos were recorded with members of the Cleveland Orchestra and others with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra; and back in the heyday of LP, I collected all of them. Casadesus and Szell, in fact, were my introduction to Mozart’s piano concertos, and I still have a fondness for those recordings.

The timings between this Casadesus/Schuricht and the Casadesus/Szell performances are remarkably close: 13:14, 8:07, 8:07 vs. 13:22, 8:49, 8:05. Only in the second movement do Casadesus and Szell adopt a more leisurely tempo. But aside from the timing similarities, I find that I actually prefer this Casadesus/Schuricht reading. Where Szell feels earthbound with a strict adherence to the beat, Schuricht seems to take wing with more flexible phrasing that lends a freer, more lyrical character to the music. The violins, in particular, sound like they’re floating, and this, in turn, prompts playing of pearl-like beauty from Casadesus. There’s a gentle joy in the third movement that I don’t hear in the not faster but harder-driven Szell version. Given the vintage and venue of the recording, the sound is excellent.

I’m not as happy with the Brahms Symphony. The main problem lies with the recording, which, though it comes from the same venue a year later, sounds bottom-heavy and murky. I’m guessing that the larger contingent of players in the Vienna Philharmonic, compared to the chamber-sized Swiss ensemble for the Mozart, posed challenges that the microphones and recording equipment weren’t entirely able to resolve.

Setting that aside, Schuricht’s performance of Brahms’s Second Symphony is quite interesting, which is not necessarily to say that I find it to my liking. For one thing, it stands in rather stark contrast to some recent versions in the matter of tempo. As I and others have noted, tempos in Brahms’s works, with exceptions, of course, have tended towards a gradual slowing over the past 40 or 50 years. Schuricht confirms that perception with a reading of the score that’s nothing if not bracing. But it’s not the conductor’s pacing per se that gives me pause. Rather, it’s his somewhat aggressive approach, which treats more rhythmically vigorous and dramatically heightened passages with explosive accents and notes cut short of their full metric values. In the past, I may have complained that some conductors are too keen on smoothing out the edges, especially in this score, which has often been called Brahms’s “Pastoral” Symphony. But Schuricht seems to err in the opposite direction and in so doing alters the complexion of the piece and its lyrical impulses.

A Carl Schuricht discography at carlschuricht.com/SchurichtCD.htm, so up to date that it includes the current release, lists a number of recordings of Brahms’s Second Symphony by the conductor with the Vienna Philharmonic on Decca (1953), the ORTF on Altus (1963), the Stuttgart RSO on Hänssler (1966), and a number of others. I reviewed the Stuttgart/Hänssler CD in 29:1, and said of it then that the performance, only a year before the conductor’s death, “does not dawdle.” “If anything,” I continued, “I would have preferred a slightly slower pace for the Adagio, which could have benefited from a bit more expansive phrasing and shaping.

If that performance was a bit too fast for my taste, consider this earlier one with the Vienna Philharmonic vs. the later one with the Stuttgart Radio:

VPO (1962): 15:15, 9:06, 5:07, 9:26 = 38:54
RSO (1966): 16:20, 9:22, 5:35, 10:12 = 41:29

Schuricht actually did slow down considerably in his last days, but even then I noted that the RSO reading felt a bit pressed and impatient to me. If you prefer your Brahms Second not to trot along too slowly, but you don’t want it to gallop either, I’d recommend Schuricht’s final RSO recording on Hänssler over this 1962 VPO version. Besides, it’s in stereo and the sound is much better. The Mozart with Schuricht and Casadesus, however, is a winner.

As readers of this magazine most likely already know from my previous reviews of two major collections of his recordings by SWR, I am an admirer of the art of Carl Schuricht (1889–1967), and so I requested this CD for review with anticipation. At the same time, from past experience I was aware of two things: Mozart was not always his strongest suit, and his Brahms interpretations were highly variable and unpredictable.

“Unpredictable” turned out to be a good descriptor for both performances, preserved in clear mono sound that is tilted somewhat toward the treble frequencies. The Mozart looks forward with almost uncanny prescience to certain aspects of recent HIP practices. While the booklet provides no information on this count, my ears tell me that the Swiss Festival Orchestra was (at least for this performance) a body of reduced size from a full-scale modern symphony orchestra. Textures are transparent and light as a soap bubble; articulation is crisp and pointed; tempos are sprightly though not rushed. Casadesus is at one with Schuricht; he uses virtually no pedal, and his fleet-fingered touch brings his modern instrument as close to the realm of the pianoforte as is possible to do. This is Mozart of great elegance, but (unlike Schuricht’s live concerto performances with Clara Haskil) chary of the weight and shadows of emotional depth. I tremendously admire the execution, without being entirely won over by the interpretation.

I was previously prepared for Schuricht’s potential idiosyncrasy in Brahms by a 1953 performance of the First Symphony with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (Archiphon, nla), which has the most eccentric rendition of the finale of that work I think I am ever likely to hear. For the Second Symphony, my previous exposure was his 1966 performance with his longtime base ensemble, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony, and his 1953 studio recording with the Vienna Philharmonic for Decca. The Stuttgart performance is one of great autumnal ripeness, with very relaxed tempos throughout. This 1962 outing with the Vienna Philharmonic, by contrast, is far more impulsive, belying the work’s reputation as Brahms’s “Pastoral.” Every movement is up to a minute faster; but even more striking is the sense of underlying tension and unsettled waywardness. (Although its studio predecessor is slightly faster yet, it is characterized instead by far greater equipoise and serenity.) String passages have a febrile edginess; brass chords are far more prominent and given an almost snarling edge. Portions of the first movement development section bristle with nervousness; the normally wistful second movement suddenly turns stormy and even menacing at the 4:00 mark; the scherzo is more jumpy than bucolic; the finale is almost defiantly punched out at points. The audience bursts into enthusiastic applause at the close; I am far less sure what to make of it all. I admire the responsiveness and razor-sharp execution of the Vienna Philharmonic, but this simply is not how I customarily hear this work.

The two easiest types of reviews for a critic to write are those for performances that are either truly great or truly awful. Much harder to compose are those for performances that are either solid but not outstanding, or are very good but still seem to have something essential missing. By far the hardest kind of review to write, though, is one for performances where the interpreters provide top-notch executions that are at odds with the critic’s preconceptions or preferences, in ways that he or she cannot readily resolve. That is the situation here. I remain intrigued but unsettled by what I hear—interpretations far too thoughtful and well played to set aside, but ones that lie outside of my usual ambit. I have sought to give objective accounts of these two performances, so that readers can make their own judgments. With a cautionary yellow flag, strongly recommended to those who believe they might find these approaches appealing.

Sommet de l’album, le Quatuor de Grieg, œuvre géniale qu’ils ne gravèrent jamais au disque et qu’ils magnifient par un engagement de tous les instants [...]

Je crois bien ne plus l’avoir entendu aussi vert depuis la gravure indémodable de Wolfgang Schneiderhan et de Karel Ančerl. Grand disque, qui me révèle une violoniste absolument à suivre.

Ferdinand Leitner règle pour son soliste un orchestre abrupt ou aérien, d’une incroyable variété de timbres et d’atmosphères. Là encore, cette prise en concert me semble supérieure à celle réalisée en studio avec le compositeur. Portrait remarquable d’un violoniste qu’on oublie trop.