The Amit Peled Peabody Cello Gang

Presentación del Álbum

The Amit Peled Peabody Cello Gang consists of students of the American-based Israeli cellist, a professor at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, together with Peled himself. This kind of teacher-student collaboration is difficult to pull off, but Peled does it here: the program has a kind of informality that manages to convey the teaching process; the playing is not flawless, but the enthusiasm has not been squeezed out. A good part of the album's success comes from the fact that the program is suited to the students' talents. Worth the money in itself is the Requiem, Op. 66, of David Popper, a 19th century cellist who was closely connected to both Brahms and Liszt. This work is unique. It is not a choral requiem mass but exists in versions for three cellos and orchestra and three cellos and piano; the latter version is heard here. Written in memory of Popper's Hamburg publisher, it has an unmistakably elegiac tone even with the absence of text. Sample toward the end of the Requiem, where the piano comes to the fore in the texture. The four-cello arrangement of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, D. 821, also works well inasmuch as it is a work hardly ever played in an unarranged form. The Handel Sonata for two cellos and continuo in G minor, Op. 2, No. 8, with a piano filling the continuo role, is a throwback to an earlier way of playing Baroque music. The school rehearsal hall acoustics are a drawback, as is the lack of coherence of the whole; the pieces were recorded at different times and places. But this is a recommended glimpse of the learning process in a time when too often, everything has to be too perfect.
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