Ernest Bloch; Luigi Dallapiccola; György Ligeti - Suites for Solo Cello (Natalie Clein)

Information

Composer: Ernest Bloch; Luigi Dallapiccola; György Ligeti

• Bloch - Suite No. 1 for solo cello
• Bloch - Suite No. 2 for solo cello
• Bloch - Suite No. 3 for solo cello
• Dallapiccola - Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio
• Ligeti - Sonata for solo cello

Natalie Clein, cello

Date: 2017

Label: Hyperion

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Review

Despite the appeal and popularity of Bloch’s Schelomo, his three solo cello suites have not been widely recorded. They were written late in the composer’s life, in 1956-57, after he had retired from teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and were inspired by the Canadian cellist Zara Nelsova. Unfortunately, Nelsova, who worked closely with Bloch in the years after the end of the Second World War, left no recording of the pieces. The German cellist Peter Bruns recorded them in 1997, on a disc that also included key cello works from earlier in the composer’s career, including From Jewish Life and Baal Shem, when Bloch was self-consciously interested in discovering within himself what it meant to be a Jewish composer.

The late-in-life solo suites are very different in tone from those earlier works, more meditative and introspective, and while listeners will easily detect similar melodic contours to the music Bloch was writing in his Jewish Cycle works, these suites lack the long, ardent lines of Schelomo, though none of its expressive power. Cellist Natalie Clein keeps the expressive range within autumnal parameters: melancholy, lightly fretful, inward and dignified. Whereas Bruns is more forcefully rhetorical and demonstrative, Clein plays intimately, as if for herself alone. But there is nothing hermetic about her approach. Gently, insistently, quietly, she draws the listener into Bloch’s music and the results are thoroughly absorbing.

Rather than pair these relatively short works – made up of four or five movements each, most lasting only a few minutes – with other works by Bloch, Clein couples them with Dallapiccola’s 1945 Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio, thorny but powerful, written at the same time as he was working on his tremendously bleak opera Il prigioniero, and Ligeti’s 1948-53 two-movement Sonata for solo cello. Clein is every bit as commanding in the formidably difficult Dallapiccola as she is retiring in the Bloch, and her performance of the Adagio theme in the Ligeti is four minutes of pure, concentrated beauty. This lovely disc reveals the cello as a kind of private sketch pad, or journal, capturing big emotions on a small scale, with a poetic concentration in sharp contrast to the larger, more furious musical gestures of the post-war moment.

— Philip Kennicott

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Ernest Bloch (July 24, 1880 – July 15, 1959) was a Swiss-born American composer known for blending post-Romantic and neoclassical styles with Jewish musical themes. He studied in Switzerland and Belgium, taught at the Geneva Conservatory, and moved to the U.S. in 1916. Bloch became the first director of the Cleveland Institute of Music and later led the San Francisco Conservatory. He taught at UC Berkeley until retiring in 1952. Bloch's compositions, influenced by Debussy, Mahler, and Ravel, include Schelomo, Baal Shem, Avodath Hakodesh, Concerto Grosso No. 1, and Israel Symphony, among others.

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Luigi Dallapiccola (3 February 1904 – 19 February 1975) was a prominent Italian composer known for for his lyrical twelve-tone compositions. Raised in Trieste and interned in Austria during World War I, he was influenced early by Verdi and Wagner. He studied and later taught at the Florence Conservatory. Dallapiccola began exploring 12-tone music in the late 1930s, with Canti di prigionia marking his mature style and serving as a protest against Fascism. His works blend emotional depth with technical complexity. He taught in the U.S. during the 1950s–60s, influencing many, including composer Luciano Berio.

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György Ligeti (28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006) was a composer known for his avant-garde works emphasizing shifting textures and tone colors. Born in Hungary, he fled to Vienna after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and became active in the European new music scene, working with pioneers like Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ligeti's innovative compositions, such as Atmosphères, Requiem and Lux Aeterna, brought him international attention, especially after being featured in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ligeti left a lasting impact through his operas, concertos, piano études and orchestral works.

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British cellist Natalie Clein studied with Anna Shuttleworth and Alexander Baillie at the Royal College of Music, then studied with Heinrich Schiff in Vienna. She came to prominence after winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 1994 and was the first British winner of the Eurovision Competition for Young Musicians. Since then she has been regularly invited to work with major orchestras, conductors and musicians worldwide. Clein records regularly for Hyperion and has received a Diapason d’Or, Gramophone Disc of the Month and a Brit Award. She plays on the "Simpson" Guadagnini cello (1777).

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