Elgar Cello Concerto – Zuill Bailey

There’s a particular hazard that comes with recording the Elgar Cello Concerto in E minor, op. 85 in the twenty-first century, and it has a name: Jacqueline du Pré. Every cellist who walks into the studio to set this piece down knows a ghost is waiting there, bow already raised, and most of them either flinch from her or try to out-anguish her. Zuill Bailey does neither. That, more than anything else, is what makes his account with the Indianapolis Symphony under Krzysztof Urbanski worth hearing.

Bailey opens with real bite — the four-note declamation that begins the work has snap and gravity, not just volume. But then something curious happens. The Moderato’s first theme settles into a kind of wary self-containment, almost withheld. I confess my first reaction was mild disappointment; I wanted more heat, more of that ripe Edwardian melancholy Elgar poured into this score in the shadow of the Great War, composed at Brinkwells in 1919 while the composer was, by his own account, still hearing gunfire in his head. But the reticence turns out to be strategic. Bailey is pacing himself — and pacing us.

His tone is gorgeous throughout: dark in the lower register without turning muddy, singing at the top without a trace of steeliness. Legato phrasing that never seems to breathe, or rather breathes so naturally you stop noticing the bow changes. The instrument is a 1693 Matteo Gofriller, and it speaks with an old, burnished authority that suits this music — you can practically smell the varnish in the recording’s warmer passages. Telarc’s engineers have him a shade forward in the mix, though not offensively so; there’s room enough left for Urbanski’s woodwinds to breathe under him.

The Lento-Allegro molto transition is handled with real finesse, conductor and soloist locking eyes, so to speak, across the beat. Urbanski draws playing of considerable polish from Indianapolis — tuttis launched smoothly, texture kept lean — though I’ll admit I wanted the brass to dig in harder at a couple of climaxes. Elgar’s orchestration can turn dangerously blowsy if a director isn’t careful, granted, but there’s a difference between avoiding vulgarity and avoiding assertion.

Where this performance really earns its keep is the slow movement. The Adagio here has an almost devotional stillness at its opening, tender without sentimentality, and Bailey and Urbanski trace its odd double nature — mourning shot through with something like acceptance — with unusual sensitivity. Then the finale: the martial material gets a deliberately coarsened tone from Bailey, an ugly sound used on purpose, which then gives way to an arpeggio passage played with tremendous drive. The long lament that follows is one of the most nakedly sorrowful things Elgar ever wrote for any instrument, and Bailey finds real inwardness there, holding back vibrato just enough to let the line ache on its own. When the opening material returns it does so in fury, and the plunge into the coda has genuine adrenaline behind it.

Compared with Peter Wispelweij’s rather cerebral, undernourished reading, this is a different order of communicative playing entirely. And listeners who find du Pré’s famous 1965 album with Barbirolli almost too raw, too exposed — an open wound of a rendition — may well find in Bailey the temperament they’re after: passionate but never undone by passion, technically immaculate without turning cool.

The Smetana fillers are generous and idiomatic — Urbanski, Polish rather than Czech, nonetheless finds the right sweep in “Vltava,” its famous theme (borrowed, as everyone remembers, from a Swedish folk song by way of an Italian one) given ample space to unfurl, the river’s journey from twin springs to the Bohemian countryside painted with real atmosphere. “Vyšehrad” has noble weight in its harp-led opening, and “Šárka” has bite and narrative snap, the legend of the warrior-maiden’s vengeance never allowed to sag.

Not a top choice over du Pré-Barbirolli for those wanting the last ounce of anguish, nor over Ma-Slatkin for sheer orchestral finish. But as a modern, thoughtfully considered alternative — one that trusts Elgar’s understatement rather than fighting it — this deserves a place on the shelf. Bailey is a cellist of real stature, and this disc confirms it.