I may have missed it, but I don’t recall seeing a line of people creeping down Fifth Avenue waiting to be the first to own Steven Isserlis’ second recordings of Schelomo and Oration. Mind you, he’s an excellent cellist. His first recordings of these works were very good, and so are these. I don’t get the “war” concept either. The Bloch has nothing to do with the Bridge, which really can plausibly be related to a “war” theme. Bloch’s inspiration was quite another story, and his music’s rhapsodic opulence springs from a realm utterly apart from Bridge’s elegiac austerity. Still, as I said, the performances are very well played, with Isserlis responding to each work’s unique sound world passionately and idiomatically (he actually plays Zara Nelsova’s cello, and her Decca recording of Schelomo under Ansermet remains the reference recording of the work). Hugh Wolff provides excellent accompaniments.
Stephen Hough’s The Loneliest Wilderness is a 16-minute concerto for cello and chamber orchestra based on the poem “My Company” by Herbert Read. It’s a gentle work, lyrical and fluently written, and very enjoyable in its unassuming way. Again, stylistically it has nothing to do with the other music on the disc, and while the poem fits in with the “war” concept, it hardly matters as an audible reflection of the programming. As you may have guessed, I’m not a big fan of “concept” albums that don’t make musical sense, but that’s really a quibble. It’s good to have this example of the hugely talented Hough’s compositional output on disc, and if the coupling works for you purely as repertoire, this very well-recorded program is easily recommendable.
