Symphony for cello and orchestra, Op. 68 (1963, rev.1964) [31:29]
Sonata for cello and piano in C, Op. 65 (1960/61) [20:39]
Cello Suite No. 1, Op. 72 (1964) [24:38]
Cello Suite No. 2, Op. 80 (1967) [20:01]
Cello Suite No. 3, Op. 87 (1971) [20:57]
Tema ‘Sacher’ (1976) [1:34]
Alban Gerhardt (cello)
Steven Osborne (piano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Manze
rec. 10-11 March 2012, City Hall, Candleriggs, Glasgow (Cello Symphony);
19, 22 December 2011 (Cello Suites, Tema ‘Sacher’), 21 December 2011 (Sonata), Henry Wood Hall, London
HYPERION CDA67941/2 [52:10 + 67:13]
Fifty years on, the friendship between Benjamin Britten and Mstislav Rostropovich still feels like one of those rare creative collisions that changes what an instrument can mean. Not just what it can do — what it can say. The six works gathered on this double Hyperion release, spanning 1960 to 1976, amount to something close to a private correspondence conducted in sound, and Alban Gerhardt, with Andrew Manze and Steven Osborne as his collaborators, makes a persuasive case that this music deserves a permanent place in the repertoire rather than the respectful neglect it too often receives.
Start with the Sonata for Cello and Piano in C, Op. 65. It came directly out of that September 1960 encounter at the Royal Festival Hall, where Britten and Rostropovich met at the London premiere of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto — the composer himself in attendance, which must have lent the evening an almost ceremonial charge. Within months Britten had produced this five-movement work, and Rostropovich premiered it with Britten at the piano at Aldeburgh in 1961. The piece lurches between tenderness and something harder to name — a kind of bruised wit, especially in the “Scherzo-Pizzicato” movement, where the cellist is required to sound simultaneously percussive and lyrical.
Gerhardt and Osborne are beautifully matched here. Gerhardt plays with the kind of focused, burnished tone that never turns glassy under pressure — there’s always weight behind the sound, a physical presence — and Osborne is that increasingly rare thing, a chamber pianist who listens as intently as he plays. The opening “Dialogo” movement unfolds with real patience, neither player rushing the long, questioning phrases that Britten builds toward something that never quite resolves. Good. It shouldn’t resolve.
Then there is the Cello Symphony.
This is the problematic one, and I might as well say so plainly. Britten completed it in 1963, the year after the War Requiem, and there are moments — the grinding ostinatos of the first movement, the hollow brass writing in the Adagio — when you feel the emotional aftermath of that larger work still reverberating. Rostropovich gave the premiere in Moscow in 1964, Britten conducting, and the score they were working from was dense, dark, resistant to easy sympathy. It still is. I remember my own early struggles with it: repeated hearings before the architecture became legible, before the journey from despair toward something resembling — not joy exactly, but release — started to feel inevitable rather than effortful.
Manze is exactly the right maestro for this. His background as a baroque violinist might seem an odd qualification, but it has given him an instinct for structural transparency that serves Britten’s thornier pages well. He conducted the Munich Philharmonic in Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, the Sinfonia da Requiem, and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra back in 2010 — a concert I remember for the uncommon clarity he brought to scores that conductors often smother with atmosphere. He knows how to let Britten breathe without letting him dissolve into vagueness.
The BBC Philharmonic plays with genuine commitment. The strings have real body in the Cello Symphony‘s slow movement, and the woodwind solos — there are several, placed like markers along a dark road — are characterized rather than merely executed. The balance with Gerhardt is shrewdly managed; in lesser performances the soloist can seem to be fighting the orchestra, but here the relationship feels genuinely symphonic, the cello embedded in the texture rather than perched on top of it.
Osborne, who has been one of Hyperion’s most distinguished artists for years, returns for the solo piano pieces and the later chamber works. His accounts of the Suite for Harp — transcribed here for piano, an arrangement that works better than you might expect — and the Third Suite for Cello are particularly fine. The Third Suite, written in 1971 and making use of Russian Orthodox hymns Britten had heard on his visits to Rostropovich, is in some ways the most personal document in the set. By 1976, when Rostropovich was finally expelled from the Soviet Union, the friendship had acquired a weight neither man could have anticipated in 1960. Gerhardt plays the final pages with the kind of stillness that takes nerve to sustain.
Is this the definitive album of these works? Rostropovich’s own recordings with Britten at the piano retain an authority that borders on the unreproducible — there is simply no substitute for the composer’s own interpretive intelligence, however imperfect the execution. But Gerhardt, Manze, and Osborne make a genuine artistic argument for this music on its own terms, without the distraction of historical piety. The Cello Symphony in particular has never sounded more structurally coherent to me on disc. That is not a small achievement. This centenary set earns its place on the shelf.
