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Category: Reviews

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    Penguin Guide to CDs

    Cello sonata (in one movement); 2 Pieces for

    cello and piano; Romance; Hassan: Serenade.

    (N) Ph. Dig. 454 458-2 [id]. Julian Lloyd

    Webber, Bengt Forsberg — GRIEG: Cello sonata.***

    Julian Lloyd Webber offers a most attractive coupling of the complete cello and piano music of both Delius and Grieg, composers closely linked both in musical style and as personal friends. Since he last recorded the Delius Cello sonata (for Unicorn in 1981) Lloyd Webber has refined and deepened his reading, making it tauter than before. He is just as warmly sympathetic in the shorter pieces.

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    The Times June 1976

    “In Mr Lloyd Webber, for the first time since Jacqueline du Pre took the Concerto and Sonata into her repertory, Delius has an eloquent exponent able to draw out the long-spanned sequential writing and make emotional rhetoric out of a style which can easily sound merely prolix.”

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    The Strad June 1998

    Delius and Grieg cello music

    DELIUS Cello Sonata; Two Pieces; serenade from Hassan; Romance

    GRIEG Cello Sonata in A minor, Intermezzo

    Julian Lloyd Webber (cello),Bengt Forsberg (piano)

    Philips 454 458-2

    ‘When I first heard Grieg,’ Delius wrote, ‘it was if a breath of mountain air had come to me.’ How true are those words in this disc, as we move from the hot-house environment of his music to the limpid beauty of Grieg’s Intermezzo and Sonata. They are a world apart, a fact made all the more obvious by Julian Lloyd Webber’s excellent performances.

    The Delius Sonata (1916) is a score of intense beauty conceived as a single uninterrupted arch, and Lloyd Webber invests the music with an abundant spectrum of tone colour. Maybe his use of portamentos almost errs on the generous, yet one feels his love and affection for Delius, the soaring lines of the Caprice, the first of the Two Pieces, being a moment of erotic radiance.

    For the Grieg, Lloyd Webber totally changes his approach and tone quality, the gentle lyricism of the Intermezzo perfectly captured. His view of the sonata is more introverted than normal, with rather muted moments of drama. It is a view I enjoyed, and in Bengt Forsberg Lloyd Webber has a partner who ideally complements his interpretations.

    DAVID DENTON

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    Gramophone March 1974

    Music for Cello and Piano

    Julian Lloyd Webber (cello), Clifford Benson (piano).

    Bach; Solo Cello Suite No. 3 in C major, BWV1009. Boccherini: String Quintet, Op. 37 No. 7—Rondo in C major.

    Beethoven: Cello Sonata No. 4 in C major, op. 102 No. 1—first movement. Popper: Gavotte No. 2 in D major, Op. 23.

    Saint-Saens: Allegro appasionata, Op. 43. Fauré: Elegie in C minor, Op. 24. Delius: Cello Sonata in one movement.

    A welcome record on several counts. I imagine that I have been asked to comment on it because the longest single work it contains is Delius’s Sonata for cello and piano, and hearing the first-ever recording of that wonderful piece provided me with one of my major musical experiences at the age of sixteen. There have, been three other versions since then, but this is the one I prefer, and the one most worthy of a place beside that original recording by its dedicatee, Beatrice Harrison, with Harold Craxton (HMV Dl103-4, 8/26).

    Setting aside any private contentment that a favourite work, still hardly known to the majority of professional cellists, should be included here among more familiar items of the cello repertoire, let me welcome the disc as a whole. What a splendid idea this “All about Music” Library seems: the “Voice of the Instrument” series has real informative and educational value. The accompanying booklet, modest though it is, gives a potted history of the instrument, a diagram showing how the cello works, and a succinct introduction to the music played. This certainly provides model examples of how to write for the cello, with the two Bourrées from Bach’s Solo Cello Suite and the first movement of Beethoven’s C major Cello Sonata representing the staple classic of the repertoire. Quite right that Popper should have his place: cello fodder, maybe, but of superior quality. The Saint-Saëns and Fauré pieces, too, have their deserved place, and, between them, the selected pieces provide scope for all kinds of cello playing: double-stopping, glissandi and harmonics are here, but I miss some typical pizzicato. Whether they seek cellistic enlightenment or not, all Delius lovers will have to acquire this record for the really beautiful and lovingly played account of the Delius Sonata. Two fine young players on the threshold of undoubtedly distinguished careers could hardly have offered a better carte de visite as proof of their musical sensitivity. And the recording has the right kind of resonance to enhance the superlative cello and piano tone they produce.

    F.A.

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    BBC Music Magazine May 1998

    DELIUS Cello Sonata; Two Pieces; serenade from Hassan; Romance

    GRIEG Cello Sonata in A minor, Intermezzo

    Julian Lloyd Webber (cello),Bengt Forsberg (piano)

    Philips 454 458-2 65:43 mins

    Lloyd Webber and Forsberg make an exceptionally well-matched partnership in this disc of Delius and Grieg complete works for cello and piano. It’s easy to ride roughshod over Delius’s music, but here every dynamic, nuance and subtlety of tempo is delicately accomplished. The single-movement Sonata is a particularly rewarding experience: Lloyd Webber caresses the music and plays it with passionate conviction —from the opening melody, rising richly from the reverberant lower strings, through characteristic drooping minor thirds and languid rubatos, to a wonderful, uplifting culmination.

    Forsberg’s renowned excellence as a recital partner provides Lloyd Webber with a much more sympathetic accompaniment than did Eric Fenby, with whom he has also recorded the work (on Unicorn-Kanchana) — despite Fenby’s eulogy on the Sonata, printed in the booklet notes.

    The Grieg Sonata too is a treat, though more fire could have gone into the climaxes of the stormy first movement. The Andante 5 treated with such reverence that Lloyd Webber gives the impression that he hardly dares play it, while the folk-inspired finale inspires confident, rhythmically precise playing from both.

    The character pieces which complete the disc include the early Delius Romance (1896): this shows most clearly the influence Grieg had on the younger composer at this stage. Janet Banks

    PERFORMANCE *****

    SOUND *****

  • Delius Cello Sonata: The Times

    15th December

    London Debut

    Julian Lloyd Webber and Clifford Benson made their first London appearance as a cello and piano duo ib Tuesday. Mr Lloyd Webber’s cello tone is full and clear, his control assured: this combination worked like a dream in the nostalgic effusion of Delius’s sonata. Beethoven’s Op 102 No2 in D demands more varied qualities; the players caught some of the slow movement’s heavenly introspection, and contributed intelligent ideas elsewhere, notably the first movement coda and the lead into the finale. They had less to say in their opening Vivaldi sonata but Brahms’s Op99 pulsed with life-blood.

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    Gramophone April 1998

    Delius and Grieg Cello Music

    Delius Sonata for Cello and Piano.

    Caprice and Elegy. Hassan — Serenade (arr. Fenby). Romance.

    Grieg Intermezzo in A minor, CWI 18. Sonata for Cello and Piano in A minor, op. 36.

    Julian Lloyd Webber (vc); Bengt Forsberg (pf).

    Philips ® D 454 458-2PH (66 minutes: DDD).

    The links, both musical and personal, between Grieg and Delius are many, which makes this a very apt and attractive coupling, bringing together all the works each composer wrote for this medium. This is Julian Lloyd Webber’s second recording of the Delius Cello Sonata. His earlier version — made in 1981 — was with Eric Fenby for Unicorn-Kanchana, and is coupled on CD with the three Delius violin sonatas. The contrasts are fascinating. The overall duration this time is almost two minutes shorter, and the easier flow goes with a lighter manner and a less forward balance for the cello.

    The result in this freely lyrical single-movement structure is more persuasive, less effortful, with greater light and shade, and with just as much warmth in the playing. In that Lloyd Webber is splendidly matched — as he is throughout the disc — by the playing of Bengt Forsberg. best known for accompanying his compatriot, the mezzo. Anne-Sofie von Otter, not least in their Gramophone Award-winning disc of Grieg songs (DG. 6/93). Here Forsberg’s variety of expression and idiomatic feeling for rubato consistently match those of his partner. The Caprice and Elegy of 1930. originally dictated to Fenby, much slighter pieces with obsessively repetition phrases, like the Hassan Serenade, inspire equally free and spontaneous performances, and it is particularly good to have the tuneful Romance of 1898, written in Paris, which inexplicably remained neglected for 80 years till Lloyd Webber revived it.

    The Grieg Sonata, too, among the most inspired and intense of his longer works, prompts magnetic playing, again with more light and shade than is common, helped by not having the cello spotlit in a natural recording acoustic. The mystery of the very opening is intensified, and the pianissimos from both cellist and pianist are daringly extreme, especially so in the central slow movement with its haunting quotation from Grieg’s Sigurd Jorsalfar “Homage March”. The lyrical Intermezzo provides an attractive makeweight. Though a very high proportion of the music here is reflective, the meditative intensity of the playing sustains it well. The booklet contains a delightful photo of Delius with Grieg and his wife as well as Halvorsen and Sinding, all playing cards.

    EG

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    The Times 15th December

    London Debut

    Exceptional Talent

    Wigmore Hall Recital December 7th

    An exceptional talent, the 20-year-old cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, made his first Wigmore Hall sonata recital last night a very distinguished affair.

    An equally gifted and now well-established musician, Clifford Benson, was his partner at the piano. It was evident that their close partnership had been achieved in many collaborations, which may explain the risk they took in opening with the Vivaldi Sonata No. 5.

    The rich adagio and the atheletic fugue of Beethoven’s Sonata in D major were marvellously integrated and balanced.

    An expansive account of the Delius Sonata brought out the opulence of the instrument.

    DAWM

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    The Guardian 13th February 1998

    Julian Lloyd Webber plays Delius and Grieg

    Delius: Cello Sonata, Caprice and Elegy,

    Serenade (Hassan), Romance; Grieg: Cello Sonata, lntermezzo

    Lloyd Webber/Forsberg (Philips 454 458-2)

    ****

    Julian Lloyd Webber has had the attractive idea of offering, in coupling, the complete cello and piano music of both Delius and Grieg, composers closely linked both in musical style and as personal friends. Since he last recorded the Delius Cello Sonata — for Unicorn in 1981 — Lloyd Webber has refined and deepened his reading, now tauter than before in a single-movement work which can seem to sprawl. The Grieg Sonata, too, prompts magnetic playing. The pianissimos from both cellist and pianist are daringly extreme, magically so in the central slow movement with its haunting quotation from Grieg’s Homage March.

    Edward Greenfield

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    The Sunday Telegraph 1st February 1998

    THE SUNDAY REVIEW – Critics’ Choice

    Grieg/Delius Cello Sonatas etc.

    Lloyd Webber/ Forsberg (Philips 454 458-2).

    An intelligent pairing, since Delius loved Grieg’s music. Both composers’ cello sonatas, played with passionate advocacy by Julian Lloyd Webber and Bengt Forsberg, are untypical in that Grieg’s — a glorious work — is more tempestuous than one would expect from this lyricist and Delius’s is structurally taut. Yet both are typical in their richness of material.

    Michael Kennedy