Elgar: Cello Concerto / Bridge: Oration
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EDWARD ELGAR / FRANK BRIDGE
Elgar: Cello Concerto / Bridge: Oration
Gabriel Schwabe (cello) / ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Ward
[ Naxos / CD ]
Release Date: Friday 19 November 2021
These two masterpieces are shadowed by the events of the First World War. Elgar's Cello Concerto, an intensely poignant, reflective and individual musical statement, has enjoyed unflagging popularity among musicians and listeners for over 100 years. By contrast, Frank Bridge's Oration (Concerto elegiaco) remained unperformed for decades after its early hearings. Yet it shares spiritual affinities with Elgar's work and serves as a funeral address of huge solemnity and narrative power in its outcry against the futility of war.
"Schwabe produces a tone from his 1695 Guarneri instrument that is intensely expressive, with a plangent, slightly nasal quality in the upper register, and a sound lower down that is always clear, never afflicted with excessive resonance. That plaintive quality is much in evidence in the Elgar, and I admire so much Schwabe's approach to this work, surely one of the most recorded concertos in the catalogue." MusicWeb Recommended Jan 2022
"[Schwabe] is no less eloquent than British interpreters Julian Lloyd Webber and Steven Isserlis. Among countless accounts of Elgar's valedictory orchestral work, Schwabe - with the VRSO under Christopher Ward - can hold his head high too." Sunday Times
"hugely impressive, full of finely realised detail, and lacking in bombast…Some may prefer the heart-on-sleeve approach of more celebrated recordings, but Schwabe makes his own quietly eloquent case for Elgar's work, just as he is a superb advocate for Bridge's." The Guardian Five Stars
Tracks:
Elgar:
Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85
Bridge:
Oration, Concerto elegiaco
