SACDs - Bloch, E

This programme is well conceived and draws some truly moving playing. The coda to Bridge’s Oration makes a serious challenge for the title of ‘most beautiful ending to a cello concerto’ Isserlis.

Schelomo is an extraordinary work where Bloch seems to have created a new musical language inspired by Jewish music dating back thousands of years. Often mistaken for film music, Schelomo’s immediacy and descriptiveness has influenced many film composers.

Isserlis plays the ‘Marquis de Corberon’ Stradivarius of 1726, formerly owned by Zara Nelsova who was the first to record Bloch’s Schelomo with the composer conducting.

Steven Isserlis has earned a reputation as one of the foremost cellists of our day. At the same time he has become known for his ingenuity and innovation in programming, something which this disc is the perfect example of. It combines four works for cello and orchestra all arranged at his personal request, and each of them by the arranger of his choice.

The most radical reworking is the opening piece, an arrangement based on the fact that Debussy at the age of 19 composed a Suite for cello and orchestra. All that is known for certain about this suite is that its fourth movement was called Intermezzo, and that this piece has survived in a version for cello and piano. In her imaginative reconstruction of – or rather replacement for – Debussy’s original composition, Sally Beamish has used this piece as the opening movement, going on to construct orchestral arrangements of four other Debussy works from the same period, including the piano pieces Rêverie and Danse bohémienne. The two Ravel songs which follow were arranged by Isserlis’ friend, the violinist Richard Tognetti, in order to supplement the concert programme for a tour that the two were to make with Tognetti’s own Australian Chamber Orchestra. Vladimir Blok’s orchestration of Prokofiev’s Concertino, which had been left incomplete at the death of the composer, was made as Isserlis was unhappy with the existing arrangement of the work, made by Kabalevsky. The disc closes with the earliest of these four re-visions, film composer Christopher Palmer’s orchestration of Ernest Bloch’s From Jewish Life. Throughout the programme Isserlis receives the expert support of Tapiola Sinfonietta and Gábor Takács-Nagy.

Violinist, pianist, conductor, composer, Ernest Bloch, had to live between two worlds: his native Europe, torn by wars and anti-Semitism, and the American mirage offering successes as glorious as they were short-lived. Voice in the Wilderness, written 20 years after the famous Schelomo, remains little known. This masterpiece exists in two versions: a dialogue between piano and cello, and a rhapsody in which the piano gives way to a large orchestra. In the first recording since 1952, Voice in the Wilderness is again heard in its original version along with its vibrant summary, Visions and Prophecies.

The three works for violin and orchestra gathered here testify both to the versatility of Vadim Gluzman as a performer and to the richness and variety of the influences at play in American music during the 20th century. Like the text by Plato which inspired it, Bernstein's Serenade, from 1954, is a series of statements in praise of love. Musically it is typical of its maker, with allusions both to his own music and to works by Bartók, Mendelssohn and Stravinsky, and with a hint of jazz in the finale. Composed some thirty years earlier, Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem turns to the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, dealing specifically with aspects of the Chassidic movement. Its second movement, Nigun (Improvisation) is probably Bloch's most famous work for the violin, an attempt to recreate the ecstasy generated by fervent religious singing. Samuel Barber, on the other hand, was deeply fascinated by the music of J.S. Bach and Brahms, although this is not always obvious in his music. His Violin Concerto, which he began to compose in Switzerland in 1939, while war was breaking out in Europe, has been described as having 'a chastened and aristocratic classic style'. That violinist Vadim Gluzman possesses the musical convictions and the supreme command of his instrument to do justice to all of these works will be clear to anyone who has encountered his previous concerto disc, with works by Tchaikovsky and Glazunov. The recipient of numerous distinctions, it was glowingly reviewed, for instance in International Record Review: 'The variety of tone, lithe, sinuous and febrile ... is truly exceptional.' Gluzman is here supported by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) under John Neschling, a team that has demonstrated its versatility on a number of recordings ranging from Villa-Lobos' Choros to Liszt's piano concertos.

Following on from his Tchaikovsky and Glazunov violin concertos disc, Vadim Gluzman now presents a disc of virtuoso violin music by a range of different composers with a sparkling programme fit for any of those virtuosos of days gone by. Indeed, several of them appear in the list of contents in the unaccustomed roles of composer or arranger: Heifetz himself has arranged Fairy Tale, by Medtner, while Szeryng’s version of Halffter’s Habanera receives its world première recording with this release. Other examples of virtuoso-turned-composer are Wieniawski, Francescatti (with a Polka) and Kreisler, whose La Gitana fits into the tradition of virtuoso pieces inspired by gypsy music – a tradition of which Ravel’s Tzigane is of course the jewel.

Here Gluzman performs with Angela Yoffe, his regular duo partner as well as his wife. This well-matched pair has been admired by the reviewers for their intense, passionate and powerful performances as well as for their supreme command of their respective instruments. On their first disc on BIS the reviewer on website Classics Today wrote: ‘Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe push their collective virtuosity sky-high’.