Title: The Sound of Pablo Casals – Historic Cello Recordings

Forty years gone, and still that sound — burnished, urgent, faintly gruff at the edges like a man clearing his throat before he tells you something important — refuses to fade into the sepia of history. Casals died in Puerto Rico in October 1973, an old lion of ninety-six who had spent his last decades in political exile and moral protest, refusing to play in countries that recognized Franco’s Spain. That biography matters when you listen to these discs. This was never just a cellist. This was a conscience with a bow arm.

EMI’s new box arrives, inevitably, as an act of reassembly rather than revelation. Anyone who has followed the Casals discography over the past two decades knows the terrain: Naxos combing through the acoustic sides and salon encores, Biddulph doing its usual scrupulous work on the early electricals, Sony and EMI both circling back to Prades with new transfers every few years like pilgrims returning to a shrine. What’s genuinely rare here is the Sardanes material — Casals presiding, in some unspecified capacity, over recordings of Catalonia’s communal dance, the music of his childhood in Vendrell. You won’t find that on Naxos. It’s a small, touching curiosity, more valuable as documentation of Casals-the-Catalan than as an addition to any canon of great cello recordings.

The heart of the set, though — as it should be — is disc one. The Dvořák concerto in B minor with Szell and the Czech Philharmonic, taped in Prague in 1937, remains one of the load-bearing pillars of the whole recorded cello repertoire. Listen to the way Casals attacks the opening of the finale — not politely, not “correctly,” but as if he’d been waiting the whole first movement to say something urgent. The tone is never merely exquisite. It rasps, it sighs, it occasionally barks. That unglamorous honesty is exactly why eighty-odd years later cellists still measure themselves against it. Szell, not yet the martinet of Cleveland legend, follows him like a man reading his mind.

The Elgar, done in London not long after the war with Adrian Boult, is a different animal — greyer, more resigned, the sound of an England and an artist both exhausted by catastrophe. Some have argued (Tortelier among the dissenters, if memory serves, though I’d want to check that) that Casals never quite got inside Elgar’s very English melancholy the way a native son like Beatrice Harrison or later du Pré did. I’m not sure I agree. There’s a specific ache in his phrasing of the slow movement that sounds to me like grief in translation — foreign, but no less real for that.

Kol Nidrei, with the ailing Landon Ronald conducting the LSO, is a lesser souvenir, competently played, dutifully accompanied, not a interpretation anyone needs to own in isolation. EMI’s transfer is fuller and warmer than the budget Dutton Vocalion coupling of the same performances — less shrill on top, more air around the orchestra — though longtime collectors will already have made their peace with one transfer or another years ago.

The encores disc is where the set has to justify itself against real competition, and here I’m less convinced. The 1929 Barcelona sessions with the ever-reliable Blas Net — sturdy, self-effacing, exactly the kind of accompanist a star of Casals’s magnitude required and rarely got — are transferred with real cleanliness, the surface noise scrubbed back further than on the Naxos equivalents. But something is lost along with the hiss. Naxos’s transfers, rougher round the edges, let you hear more of the room, more of the actual air the instrument was vibrating in. Tone is a fragile thing to argue about on paper, but I’ll say this much: I missed the grain.

No acoustic recordings appear here at all, which feels like a missed opportunity given how much of that material has become available since Biddulph did its pioneering work in the ‘90s. A box meant to commemorate an anniversary, celebrating four discs’ worth of “the sound of Casals,” might have reached back further than 1929.

Still — quibbles. What we have is a well-chosen sampler of a titanic career, generously filled, decently annotated, and priced modestly enough that newcomers won’t feel cheated. Collectors who already own the Dvořák, the Elgar, and the Prades trios in other guises may find little new to justify a fourth purchase of the same performances. But for anyone building a library from scratch, or wanting Casals in one convenient armful, this does the job with dignity. Not the last word on this extraordinary artist — there will never be a last word on Casals — but a faithful one.