Gernsheim : Complete Cello Sonatas

Album review

To be sure, when you hear the Third and final Sonata for Cello and Piano by Friedrich Gernsheim, it is hard to imagine that it was written... in 1914. But don't forget: Gernsheim was born in 1839, only shortly after Saint-Saëns and Bizet, and in the same year as Mussorgsky, and his long life only came to an end in 1916. And like Saint-Saëns, he made no attempt to accommodate himself to the latest revolutions brought about by Debussy and Stravinsky – to say nothing of Schönberg who had by then already written Pierrot Lunaire – rather, he preferred to carry on in the furrow ploughed by Brahms, and here and there we also hear a few echoes of the early Mahler. As the listener will have grasped, there is nothing avant-garde about this, but instead it's beautiful writing, carefully-crafted, lyrical, harmonious, at times violent – this is the end of the later Romanticism, in particular with the Third Symphony an also the Second Sonata of 1906. Cellist Alexander Hulshoff, who is joined at the piano by Oliver Triendl, takes on these rarities with an ardour and a conviction which are utterly contagious. We also find a beautiful isolated piece, inspired by Jewish art, Elohenu – as is Bruch's Kol Nidrei which is also for cello: and yet Bruch was the son of a Protestant pastor! Gernsheim was of Jewish descent, at a time when it was hardly an issue: one was either a good musician or not, and that was all. Elohenu followed a year after Kol Nidrei, in 1881, and was written as a friendly response to a respected colleague. © SM/Qobuz