Violoncello Archives - NativeDSD Music

Woolf: Jacqueline [Double Album]

Maria Skorochkina — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 14:00:48 +0000

Jacqueline is a powerful, award-winning new opera that dives into the real-life struggle between famed cellist Jacqueline du Pré and the multiple sclerosis that ravaged her body, mind, and talent – robbing her of her identity, her breathtaking musical gift, and ultimately her life.

The story is brought to life by celebrated American soprano Marnie Breckenridge (as Jacqueline) and former du Pré protégé and world-renowned cellist Matt Haimovitz, playing the role of her constant companion: her cello.

Grammy nominated composer Luna Pearl Woolf and Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist Royce Vavrek chart the development of great prodigy and, ultimately, great tragedy. Told in four movements – I. Star Birth; II. Super Nova; III. Meteorite; IV. Impact – the opera references Haimovitz’s personal recollections of du Pré herself.

Colorful and at times funny, raw, joyful and audacious, the form of the work echoes du Pré’s iconic interpretation of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, using the concerto’s four-movement structure to navigate a prismatic and passionate, if all too short, life in music.

Commissioned by Tapestry Opera. Dramaturgy and direction by Michael Hidetoshi Mori

Marnie Breckenridge, Soprano
Matt Haimovitz, Violoncello

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Cello Meditation

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:00:08 +0000

Cello Meditation is a compilation of beloved compositions by different composers. It features Michael Kevin Jones on Cello. He is joined by his former piano teacher John Bryden at Dartington, England on the recording.

This is the 10th release from Michael Kevin Jones at NativeDSD. The album is Exclusively Available in Stereo DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64 and the recorded format and bit rate of 32 Bit DXD from NativeDSD.

The idea of Cello Meditation comes from the beautiful opera by Massenet “Thaïs”. You will enjoy here many familiar melodies heard before in a violin piano combination but not that often on a cello.

Our Cello Meditation ranges from Bach and Handel to Rachmaninoff, Fauré, Massenet, Gounod, Schumann. A very special composition closes the program: Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei” a feast for cello fans and everyone else.

Michael Kevin Jones, Violoncello
John Bryden, Piano

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Weinberg: The Four Sonatas for Solo Cello

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 07:02:53 +0000

Weinberg: The Four Sonatas for Solo Cello features cellist Mario Brunello. The album is Exclusively Available at NativeDSD in Stereo DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64 and DXD.

Polish-born Mieczysław Weinberg twice escaped from Nazi invasions, finally settling in Moscow, where for more than 30 years he was Shostakovich’s closest musical friend. Composer of 26 symphonies, seventeen string quartets, and seven operas, he was also a master of the solo string sonata, a genre not touched by Shostakovich and little cultivated in the Soviet Union. His four sonatas for cello solo were composed between 1960 and 1985 and enshrine some of his most concentrated and poetic inspirations.

As an eclectic and innovative cellist, Mario Brunello has one of the broadest of repertoires, one that ranges from the Baroque to contemporary music. After five albums dedicated to revisiting the 18th-century masters, and particularly Bach, using the violoncello piccolo, Brunello returns to his precious “Maggini” in order to showcase these milestones of the cello literature from the second half of the 20th century: “A music that spoke to me instantly, an overwhelming force that immediately – on reading it, studying it and then little by little performing it – captivates you, with the result that you can then almost hardly do without it”.

Mario Brunello – Violoncello

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Jesus Torres: Duos With Piano

Sjoerd Staal — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 22:00:34 +0000

Duos With Piano with pianist Alberto Rosado presents itself before us like a photograph, still in development, of a part of the vital outline of Jesús Torres. It shows us his essential characteristics, his concerns, and the solutions he has adopted throughout the more than twenty years covered by this volume (1997-2018). Along with Rosado’s duo partners on the album.

This album is exclusively available in Stereo DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128 & DSD 64 at NativeDSD thanks to our signature Higher Rates Program.

The technical and expressive maturity of works such as the Fantasía for clarinet is surprising -to say the least-: a language already formed, solid and unambiguous, which allows him to move towards less explored fields in later works.

From there, the approach to extended techniques becomes more fluid in the Sonata for flute and piano, polymetric games in Splendens or the search for new articulations and timbral fusions in Variations, which increase Torres’ expressive palette.

All of them serve as testing grounds – what work is not? – for the progressive filtering towards Silentum Amoris (2018): a music without artifice, in search of the essential, suppressing all excess; expressive, vocal, dramatic at times and poetic from the root.

We have before us a set of pieces whose listening takes us through one of the most admired voices of our music and that can suppose the base of what, shortly, we can consider as the Spanish school of composition. But that is another story…

Pianist
Alberto Rosado, Piano

Duo Partners
Track 1 – José Luis Estelles, Clarinet
Track 2 – María Zubimendi, Accordion
Track 3 – Miquel Bernat, Percussion
Tracks 4 & 5 – Clara Andrada, Flute
Track 6 – David Apellaniz, Violoncello
Track 7 – Robert Silla, Oboe

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Se hace saber (Let It Be Known)

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 07:00:28 +0000

Available in Stereo DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128 and DSD 64 only at NativeDSD thanks to our signature Higher Rates Program.

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Shostakovich, Kodály, Tchaikovsky: Works for Cello and Piano

Sjoerd Staal — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 07:00:25 +0000

Shostakovich, Kodály, Tchaikovsky: Works for Cello and Piano is a new album featuring Michael Kevin Jones (Violoncello) and Ean Mei Yeoh (Piano) from HD Remastered. This is the 7th album available at NativeDSD from Michael Kevin Jones. The recording was made at the Royal College of Music recital hall during a live recital.

The program includes the rarely heard Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), duo Sonata op.4 in two movements. This sonata was inspired by folk melodies collected by Kodály although its harmonic treat- ment and development show the strong influence of impressionism. Originally conceived as a conventional Sonata in three movements, Kodály withheld the first movement due to his dissatisfaction with it and the sonata was published as a movement work.

The introductory solo cello of the Fantasía-Allegro di molto, leads to a clear folk like development in fourths characteristic of Hungarian popular music. The movement enjoys a general rhapsodic feeling with frequent virtuosic complex free rhythmic ́cymbalistic style interjections from the piano. Kodály employs a sophisticated notated system of rubato creating the illusion of improvised folk rhythms.

Although Kodály said he was inspired by Beethoven while writing the last movement of this sonata, there is a strong influence of Hungarian folk music patterns. This is an exuberant and fiery finale although Kodály clearly foresaw the structural symmetrical balance needed and added a haunting coda recapitulation of the second movement theme with intense harmonic piano chords bringing the sonata to a surprising and magical ending.

Michael Kevin Jones, Violoncello
Ean Mei Yeoh, Piano

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Shostakovich and Tsintsadze – Cello Concertos of 1966

Sjoerd Staal — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We are in the year 1966, in the Soviet Union. While Shostakovich is enjoying the success of the world première of his Second Cello Concerto, the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze is putting the finishing touches on his own new work. In their respective concertos, these two composers draw their own psychogram: a sombre landscape intermittently illuminated by rays of light, brightened up with a few prudent dabs of colour here and there.

German shooting star cellist Maximilian Hornung releases his first album on the myrios classics label. Born 1986 in Augsburg, Hornung studied with David Geringas, Thomas Grossenbacher and Eldar Issakadze, to whom he dedicated the album. It was Issakadze who introduced him to the fascinating music of Sulkhan Tsintsadze, one of the most celebrated composers of Georgia.

The musical link of Tsintsadze’s Second Cello Concerto to the late work of his Soviet colleague and contemporary, Dmitri Shostakovich is at the core of this gloomy, yet enchanting album. The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under the baton of the latvian conductor Andris Poga provides perfect musical partnership. The disc, recorded in DXD Stereo and Multichannel and available in Stereo and Multichannel DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DXD at the NativeDSD Music store, sound, comes in a beautiful PocketPac with a 40-pages booklet that includes an introduction to the works by the Shostakovich biographer and cellist Elizabeth Wilson, who, as a student of Mstislav Rostropovich, attended the premiere performance of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto in Moscow 1966.

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Silk Baroque

Sjoerd Staal — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Silk Baroque is a DSD release that brings together Wu Wei and Holland Baroque. It features a program of Baroque Music with beautiful Sheng sounds. The music, composed by Purcell, Bach, Vivaldi, and Telemann along with traditional music from China, has been arranged by Holland Baroque’s artistic team of Judith Steenbrink and Tineke Steenbrink. (Native DSD Music listeners will remember Judith and Tineke Steenbrink from the DSD Sampler “8 Ensembles in 1 Bit” on the Just Listen label.)

Speaking about this special collaboration, Wu Wei says, “Baroque music is like light. It touches you and attracts your attention whether you want it or not. You get caught in it and I mean both in positivity, and in nostalgia, and heartbreaking sorrow.”

Holland Baroque says “Wu Wei is a contemporary musician who comes from an ancient tradition. It’s no coincidence his Sheng case has a sticker on it that says: ‘Good things stay, new things arrive’.

Holland Baroque totally agrees with Wu Wei’s view of life. On the album Silk Baroque, ancient Chinese traditions are interwoven with baroque elements and improvisations. Old music does not exist; the music is only finished when you play it. We look forward to the new album with this incomparable sound virtuoso.”

Silk Baroque is available today in Stereo and Multichannel DSD 64 at the Native DSD Music store. Save more by using the ST+MCH button when ordering both versions of the album at the store.

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Terra

Sjoerd Staal — Fri, 26 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

“All music is folk music; I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.” The great Louis Armstrong’s lighthearted but lucid remark irrefutably under- mines the postmodern tendency to label every phenomenon and com- partmentalize – generally for some underlying ideological or commercial reason – the various different ways in which humanity expresses itself artistically. This reductionist trend has hit music particularly hard, with many styles having been undeservedly corralled into marginal spaces. The assumption seems to be that if bagpipes are involved it has to be “folk” music, if it’s a djembe then it’s “world” music, and guitars of course mean “POPular” music, but a Schubert-transcribed Ländler or a Haydn minuet automatically equates to “serious” or “classical” or “art” music. This assumption neatly sidesteps the fact that all composers were people – not animals, vegetables or minerals – and were therefore born into a particular sociocultural context and a particular place, ethnicity or nation. Had they been born elsewhere and nurtured by a different cultural substrate, their music would, inevitably, have been different. The musical works presented on this CD are not only the product of a particular place (true of every piece ever written, without exception), but also intentionally and unapologetically display their roots, taking folk-based materials as the earth from which they draw the neces- sary nutrients to cultivate bold, new avant-garde idioms. The journey begins with Bartók, a universal reference for all 20th- and 21st-century composers as regards this approach to composition, and places him alongside two truly fascinating gures of the Hispanic music world: Alberto Ginastera, an Argentinian of Catalan origins, and the Madrid- born Rodolfo Halffter, who left Spain for exile in Mexico at the end of the Civil War. The intriguing thing about the three works featured here is the amount they have in common, in terms of sonority, aesthetic and gesture, despite the fact that they stem from three different worlds. Comparing and contrasting these pieces is a fascinating listening ex- perience – above all, because it highlights their shared humanity, de- rived from their musical contact with the fertile Earth, mother to us all and source of our dreams and passions. Their speci c features reveal the universal nature of the different popular cultures of the world, whose diversity is the real treasure that humanizes all of us.

Let yourself be carried away. Open your ears. Listen to the Earth. Immerse yourself in its sounds. Hear its music.

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Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909)

Sjoerd Staal — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Giuseppe Martucci was a child prodigy. He gave his first piano recital when he was eight and then studied at the Naples Conservatoire. From 1870 on, he devoted his life to teaching and performing. Rubinstein and Liszt both thought very highly of him.
Between 1875 and 1880 he played in many European cities, often accompanying the cellist Alfredo Piatti. Regarded as one of the leading pianists of his day, he taught at the Naples Conservatoire from 1880 and was director of the Societa del Quartetto as well as conductor of the Societa Sinfonica orchestra which had been founded by the Prince of Ardore. During this period he was also active as a composer.

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