London Cello Connection

Albumbeschreibung

The London Cello Connection, mentioned in the title of this album, refers to the London Symphony Orchestra and the London recording location. All of the music is either American or Canadian (one of the Canadians, John Robertson, was born in New Zealand), and all is for cello and orchestra with traditional treatments of the solo instrument and of the relationship between cello and orchestra. The cellist is Ovidiu Marinescu, a Romanian-born player who teaches in Pennsylvania. Indeed, one might profitably hear this album as a way of exploring new developments in North American neo-Romanticism; the composers are not terribly familiar. All of the pieces are new, and all were apparently composed for this project; some of the composers had existing connections with the Navona Records label on which the album appears. Although the music generally might be classed as neo-Romantic, with the possible exception of Keith Kramer's more modernist Luce del Sole, they go in various directions, and there is a pleasing variety with no two pieces much resembling each other and the composers ranging from a pair born in the 1940s, Robertson and Marvin Lamb, to Katherine Price, born in 1992. Lamb's Sarabande for cello and orchestra is not a strict Baroque sarabande but evokes the mood of that somber dance. Diane Jones' Soul Dance shows the influence of Glass, while the most purely neo-Romantic piece is Joanna Estelle's I Am My Home; that one might adorn any orchestral concert. The Forest Stream, by L. Peter Deutsch, gains interest from the fact that Deutsch is better known as a software executive. Marinescu has a rich tone, especially in the low register, that is successfully exploited by several of the composers, and Miran Vaupotić, leading the London Symphony Orchestra, achieves clarity and confidence in music that was new to all the musicians involved. An attractive collection.
© James Manheim /TiVo