Britten: Suite No. 3 for cello solo, Op. 87

Matthew Barley further proves his reputation as one of the UK's most innovative and creative performers with the new programme and CD Around Britten – celebrating the centenary of Britten's birth with a selection of his works, including the Third Cello Suite and pieces by Sir John Tavener and Gavin Bryars.

The release coincides with the start of a tour of 100 events taking Britten's music to a kaleidoscopic variety of venues around the UK, reaching a huge cross section of British society. As well as concerts in conventional concert halls, Matthew will play in galleries, a cafe, a woodland in Devon, a number of cathedrals (including Canterbury), around 12 different National Trust properties and Britten's library at the Red House in Aldeburgh. The events will be featured across the year in BBC Music Magazine, and one concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3. (details of the events can be found here - http://www.matthewbarley.com/?page_id=740).

“I wish more people would think about music the way Matthew Barley does” The Times

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.

Described by the composer as ‘an ikon in sound’, The Protecting Veil exemplifies John Tavener’s use of music to explore the spiritual and religious aspects of human existence, feeding off the lyricism and depth of the cello’s timbre to create a musical symbol of the Mother of God. The meditative quality of this work is complemented by Britten’s introspective Cello Suite No.3 and Tavener’s own single-movement Thrinos, a touching lament for the dead.

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.

Through these selected masterpieces of the repertoire for solo cello, Emmanuelle Bertrand invites us on a journey to the heart of language of popular inspiration.

Composed in 1971 by Benjamin Britten for Mstislav Rostropovich, the Suite for unaccompanied cello No.3 has often been regarded as a sort of private journal of the composer’s, so emotionally charged does it seem. We do not know its exact programme, but the importance of the work’s dedicatee cannot be underestimated in view of the references it contains. It comprises nine movements, the principal elements of which come from three Russian folk themes arranged by Tchaikovsky in his volumes of folksongs for piano and a funeral hymn from the Orthodox liturgy, the Kontakion.

The masterpiece of the Catalan composer Gaspar Cassadó, the Suite for cello composed in 1925 is well known to exponents of the instrument for its virtuoso demands. Its three movements are based on three Spanish folk dances.

Pascal Amoyel’s Itinérance (2003) derives its context above all from a joint project of the composer-pianist and Emmanuelle Bertrand entitled ‘Block 15’, which generated a series of staged concerts based on the testimony of two survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Simon Laks; both musicians, they explain in their writings how music and its special status in the camps saved their lives.

The programme ends with Kodály’s Sonata Op.8, probably the most remarkable and most frequently played chamber work of the Hungarian composer. The formal simplicity of its three movements contrasts with the extraordinary technical challenges their inventiveness poses for the interpreter.

Discovered when she won the young soloist category at the Victoires de la Musique Classique in 2001, Emmanuelle Bertrand is one of today’s leading cellists. Her penchant for contemporary music has led her to give the first performances of numerous works dedicated to her, among them pieces by Édith Canat de Chizy, Pascal Amoyel, and Bernard Cavanna (Shanghai Concerto).

A passionate devotee of chamber music and member of the ensemble Les Violoncelles Français, she has appeared in duo repertoire with the pianist Pascal Amoyel since 1999. Her harmonia mundi recordings as a soloist or in tandem with Amoyel have all received prestigious critical accolades in France and abroad.

The long-awaited debut recording by this stunning young cellist who was the joint-winner of The Landor Competition in 2007. Well-known for his wide-ranging musical interests (which include collaborations with Indian musicians and extensive improvisations on folksongs from around the world) James Barralet tackles one of the pinnacles of the solo cello range in the Kodaly Sonata, giving a coruscating performance of this early twentieth-century masterpiece. He follows it with the premier recording of the Roxburgh Partita which he has frequently played in concert and records it with the composer’s blessing here. Finally a profound performance of the Third Britten Suite, which includes as an addendum a first recording of Britten’s own alternative working of the first movement.

For lovers of the cello, of twentieth century music or just of young British artists, this is a debut recording to savour.

This CD presents music composed by Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, two striking personalities from recent 20th-century musical history, who were also united by an intimate friendship. They both also shared reciprocal friendship with the inspiring and energetic Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the premier of both the three Suites for cello by Britten solo and the Second Cello Concerto in G by Shostakovich.

Pieter Wispelwey recorded Shostakovich with the Sinfonietta Cracovia which ranks among the leading Polish and European orchestras. The exceptional atmosphere of their concerts, the enthusiastic reception by the audiences, glowing reviews and, first of all, the quality of stage performances are to confirm the sustainable development of the still young ensemble.

Wispelwey needs no further explanation. In 1990 his first recording with Channel Classics, the Bach Cello Suites, was released to great acclaim and in 1992 he was the first cellist ever to receive the Netherlands Music Prize, which is endowed upon the most promising young musician in the Netherlands; thus his path was secured to the busy and varied career he has today. Recently the latest release of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with Budapest Festival Orchestra gave him, Channel Classics and Ivan Fischer and his BFO great reviews.