Britten: Suite No. 2 for cello solo, Op. 80

Britten’s meeting with Rostropovich in 1960 was a watershed, the great Russian cellist becoming the primary collaborator of his later years, and inspiring a whole series of masterworks. Among them are the three suites for solo cello, written as a conscious homage to those of Bach (there were originally to have been six). Intriguingly, the Britten scholar Paul Kildea sees the first as a coda to the War Requiem, the second as a snapshot of a lifetime of musical obsessions, and the third as reaching back to much earlier works and suffused with primordial Russian melody.

The young virtuoso Philip Higham brings a youthful vigour and deep intelligence to these seminal masterpieces, resulting in performances of commanding authority and intensity.

Philip Higham is rapidly emerging as one of the most prominent young cellists from the UK. In 2010 he won 2nd prize in the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann Competition in Berlin, making him the first British cellist in generations to have won top prizes at three major international competitions, including 1st Prize in the 2008 Bach Leipzig and 2009 Lutoslawski Competitions. He was selected for representation by Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) in 2009. Born in Edinburgh in 1985, Philip studied cello with Ruth Beauchamp at St Mary's Music School and continued his studies at the Royal Northern College of Music with Emma Ferrand and Ralph Kirshbaum. He graduated in 2007 with First class Honours and was immediately selected as an International Artist Diploma student. In 2010 he was one of the first artists invited to take part in the Royal Philharmonic Society/YCAT Philip Langridge Mentoring Scheme with Steven Isserlis.

This recording of the most famous solo cello suites of the 20th century – in which the spirit of Bach is never very far away – marked the start of the collaboration of a very young Jean-Guihen Queyras with harmonia mundi, back in 1998. Right from this first disc, the French cellist demonstrated his supremely high artistic standards. An unqualified success!

A major release at the start of Britten’s anniversary celebrations. Britten’s long friendship with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was one of the most inspiring and fruitful musical collaborations in history. It led directly to the composition of some of the most important works for cello of the twentieth century.

Alban Gerhardt, among the greatest living exponents of the instrument, performs this body of works in its entirety. In the Cello Sonata he is partnered by Steven Osborne, whose Hyperion recording of Britten’s Piano Concerto received a Gramophone Award. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Andrew Manze join Gerhardt for the Cello Symphony, Britten’s only substantial piece of absolute symphonic music.

The astonishing music for solo cello—the three suites plus the miniature Tema ‘Sacher’—completes the set. The suites are repositories of a huge number of compositional and string-playing techniques, acknowledging their debt to Bach but also demonstrating all the imagination and emotional scope for which the composer is revered.

To be the dedicatee of a work by Benjamin Britten was a much coveted honour among 20th-century classical musicians. And for an artist to be the dedicatee of a whole series of works, then the musician in question – unless he happened to be Peter Pears – must have felt exceptionally blessed.

Britten’s three Cello Suites are an example of such an exception. They were written over a period of barely a decade for Mstislav Rostropovich, and it was he who gave them their first performances. They are generally regarded as three of the greatest and finest challenges ever to be set a cellist. Daniel Müller-Schott, who had an opportunity to study with Rostropovich, faces up to this challenge with great enthusiasm and superior musicianship.

The First Suite contains stylistic and formal reminiscences of the Baroque, and Daniel Müller-Schott brings to it great nobility of tone, just as he refuses to be discouraged from striking a note of genuine emotion in the Canto passages. That his artistry is also underpinned by astute analytical skills is clear from the rigour that he brings to the part-writing in the fugue and concluding Moto perpetuo. This ability to maintain an overview of a piece also pays dividends in the Second Suite, with its rhythmically and thematically carefully balanced design, including the final Chaconne – a form whose climactic possibilities Britten had already exploited to supreme effect when writing for the full orchestra in his opera Peter Grimes. In the final movement of the Second Cello Suite the composer had no hesitation in placing similar demands on a single instrument. It is almost a foregone conclusion that a performer capable of rising to this not inconsiderable challenge will also shine in the third and last of these suites. At the time of its first performance in 1974, Britten was already too ill to fulfil his promise to write six such suites. Daniel Müller-Schott captures the work’s valedictory character, with its reminiscences of Russian folksongs and the Hymn to the Departed, bringing a keen eye for detail to the writing and not only pin-pointing all its musical beauties but revealing the ways in which those beauties are refracted through the composer’s elegiac lens. Rarely can 20th-century works have been so atmospherically interpreted.

Britten wrote these three suites for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich. They have been a bench mark of a cellist’s musicianship ever since the first performances in the early 1960s and 70s. Cellist Denise Djokic has been called one of the most captivating young artists of her generation. These are truly dedicated performances by a very gifted rising star.