The Daily Telegraph 31st January 1998
A great double act
Grieg, Delius Complete music for cello and piano.
Lloyd Webber (cello), Forsberg (piano), (Philips 454 458-2)
GRIEG and Delius go well together. They were friends for almost a quarter of a century. Grieg it was who persuaded Delius’s father to let young Fred continue his musical studies; and, for Delius, Grieg’s music was like “a breath of mountain air”.
Neither composer wrote a great deal for cello and piano, but it is all here on this captivating disc.
Julian Lloyd Webber and Bengt Forsberg find that elusive subtlety of colouring and inflection which determine the shape, the emotional perspective and the passion of Delius’s rhapsodic one-movement Sonata; charges of amorphousness might be levelled against it, but here, played with urgency, it emerges cohesively.
In the more clear-cut structure of Grieg’s Sonata the gestures are equally heartfelt, the tonal palette broad and aptly applied, the finale’s fiery temperament communicated unstintingly.
Delius’s magically rarefied Caprice and Elegy, coupled with an early Romance, Eric Fenby’s arrangement of the. Serenade from Hassan and Grieg’s modest intermezzo, are little jewels.
Geoffrey Norris
