Cello Concerto in B minor, G482 orch. and arr. Grützmacher [18:26] ¹
Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809)
Cello Concerto Op.101 in D Hob.VIIb,2 (1783) [27:31] ¹
Edouard LALO (1823-1892)
Cello Concerto in D minor (1877) [25:14] ²
Max BRUCH (1838-1920)
Kol Nidrei Op.47 (1881) [12:12] ²
Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
Kinderszenen, Op.15: Träumerei (1838) arr. Tibor de Machula [3:05] ²
Tibor de Machula (cello)
Vienna Symphony Orchestra/Bernhard Paumgartner ¹
Residentie Orkest/Willem van Otterloo ²
rec. 1951-55
FORGOTTEN RECORDS FR 691-92 [46:00 + 40:34]
The French cellist Pierre Fournier used to say that the cello was the instrument closest to the human voice — not because of any sentimental analogy, but because it could encompass the full dramatic range from whispered confession to operatic declamation. This two-disc release from Forgotten Records tests that proposition across more than a century of repertoire, with results that are sometimes revelatory and always instructive.
Start with the Boccherini. The Cello Concerto in B minor heard here is not, strictly speaking, Boccherini at all — or not entirely. Friedrich Grützmacher’s 1895 arrangement drew on several of the composer’s concertos, stitching together a hybrid that became the standard performing version for most of the twentieth century. Rostropovich played it. Casals played it. The musicological reckoning came later, with the recovery of authentic sources, and today the Grützmacher is heard less often. Which is something of a loss, because the piece works magnificently as music, whatever its genealogy. The soloist here navigates its singing first movement with a warm, centered tone — gut strings, one suspects, or at least strings under considerably less tension than modern players favor — and the ornamentation has a naturalness that no amount of period-practice self-consciousness can manufacture.
The Cello Concerto in D is a different matter entirely — later, more self-assured, and in some ways more demanding. Haydn wrote it around 1783, by which point his instrumental thinking had grown genuinely symphonic in scope. The finale especially is full of wit: sudden dynamic reversals, feints toward the tonic that turn aside at the last moment, the kind of thing that makes you laugh even when you know it’s coming. Bernhard Paumgartner and the Vienna Symphony are the partners here, and Paumgartner — a Salzburg institution best known to American audiences through his work in Mozart — brings considerable stylistic intelligence to the accompaniment. The string body sounds lean and alert, the winds characterful without being fussy. There are moments in the slow movement where the dialogue between soloist and orchestra achieves something close to chamber music intimacy, two voices finishing each other’s sentences.
Lalo’s Cello Concerto in D minor is the longest work on the program and, frankly, the most complicated to evaluate. Lalo is one of those composers whose reputation has always outrun his advocacy — celebrated in France, largely ignored elsewhere, periodically rediscovered by a soloist who needs something between Dvořák and Elgar on the program. Written in 1877, the concerto shares the structural adventurousness of his Symphonie espagnole from two years earlier, and the Spanish tinge surfaces occasionally in rhythmic gestures and modal inflections that feel slightly exotic against the prevailing French harmonic language. The rendition here catches the work’s volatile temperament — its sudden passions, its tendency to brood and then erupt — though I would not call it definitive. Some of the climaxes are pressed a bit hard, the intonation in the upper register occasionally clouds over under pressure. Still. There is something to be said for a reading that commits fully to the music’s emotional risks, even when the risks don’t entirely pay off.
The Schumann “Träumerei“ that closes the program — arranged by the cellist Tibor de Machula — is an encore piece in the finest sense: brief, unpretentious, and played with the kind of simple eloquence that only a performer completely at ease with the instrument can produce. De Machula was a principal cellist of the Vienna Philharmonic for years, and his relationship with the Viennese orchestral sound is evident in every measure. The arrangement itself is tasteful, which is not always guaranteed with Schumann transcriptions.
Forgotten Records has done the historical record a genuine service here. The transfers are clean, the documentation adequate if not exhaustive. Whether this particular artist will emerge as a major rediscovery — or remain an admired specialist’s discovery — probably depends on how deeply you care about the Lalo. I care considerably, and on that basis alone this is a set worth tracking down.
