Classical reviews: Beethoven and Roger Quilter

Beethoven: Sonatas for Cello and Piano

Leonard Elschenbroich, cello, Alexei Grynyuk, piano

(Onyx 4196)

★★★★★

With these works, Beethoven created the cello sonata as an art form, and the way Leonard Elschenbroich makes his entry in the first – emerging tentatively from the shadows – underlines the significance of that moment. Alexei Grynyuk – a fine pianist whom we don’t hear often enough as a soloist – handles his part in the Allegro with delicacy and flexibility, and his articulation throughout this recording is pellucid, even at top speed. Beethoven’s description of the Opus 5 sonatas as “for piano and cello” reflects his revelling in his own virtuosity, and they are also evidence of his early mastery of Adagio forms.

Pianist and cellist generate both mystery and a high degree of intensity in the middle-period Opus 69 sonata, and they bring unanswerable authority to the final pair, in which the music’s profundity deepens as its brevity increases. The C major sonata, with its alternating rumination and impulsiveness, comes over like a fantasia; the final sonata has oracular power.

The Complete Quilter Songbook Volume 3

Mark Stone, tenor; Stephen Barlow, piano

(Stone Records 5060192780956)

★★★★☆

Roger Quilter was a discreet but influential presence on the English musical scene in the first decades of the 20^th century. He was dogged by ill-health, and probably by the stress of his covert homosexuality. He was rich, generous, philanthropic, and was instrumental in helping Jews flee the Nazi menace in Austria.

Apart from the music to a popular children’s play called Where the Rainbow Ends, his musical output was almost all songs. This CD consists of his arrangements of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh songs, including such traditional favourites as “Drink to me only”, “Greensleeves”, “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms”. Quilter’s arrangements have a fluent charm that Mark Stone and Stephen Barlow render with relaxed grace. And it’s worth noting Stone’s remarkable achievement – as performer, translator, liner-note writer, – and, most important of all, director of the record company which he has founded, and with which he flies the flag for underrated English music.