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Category: Reviews

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    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

    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

    15th December

    London Debut

    Julian Lloyd Webber and Clifford Benson made their first London appearance as a cello and piano duo on 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

    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

    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

    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

    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

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    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

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    25th January 1998

    Julian Lloyd Webber

    Grieg/Delius – Complete Cello & Piano Music

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

    (Philips 454 458-2)

    A thoughtful pairing of two composers linked by a friendship which lasted until Grieg’s death in 1907. The poetic repertoire suits Lloyd Webber’s increasingly eloquent playing. His Delius is lyrical, especially in the Serenade from Hassan. In Grieg’s fiery A minor sonata, Lloyd Webber avoid false heroics in favour of passion. Forsberg is a sinewy, sensitive accompanist.

    Fiona Maddocks

  • Delius Cello Sonata

    19th September 1997

    Julian Lloyd Webber plays Delius

    Delius Memorial Concert Wigmore Hall, London

    Many composers have their quiet helpers, doing anything from filling in lax returns to sharpening pencils. For most British music lovers, however, the role of amanuensis surely conjures up just one image: that of Eric Fenby, who died earlier this year.

    Image is the right word, for the abiding view – of the ailing Frederick Delius impatiently dictating his pent-up music to this young assistant – was a product of the famous Ken Russell film about the composer. As recalled in Fenby’s words in the programme of Tuesday’s Wigmore Hall memorial concert, that was also how be remembered Delius when listening to one of those late pieces, so painfully written by dictation. Music’s power as a shorthand for memory is undervalued, but surely not be Delius fans. His music, after all, unlocks the sort of nostalgic memories we never thought we had.

    That seemed clear from the Cello Sonata of 1916 that began the musical partof the evening, after a moving tribute to Fenby’s work from The Delius Society’s current president, Felix Aprahamian. Its sonorous phrases reached up from the depths of the instrument’s lowest string as if made for the velvet legato of Julian Lloyd Webber. In fact, they were written for the Russian cellist Alexandre Barjansky, but Lloyd Webber was playing Barjansky’s cello, which was nearly the same thing. A heart-stopping moment that verged on the edge of sound formed the core of the slow movement. From this, the rest of the music advanced and receded.

    As in the Second Violin Sonata of 1923, played in Tertis’s viola version by Philip Dukes with pianist Sonia Rahman, there was musical eloquence of a different order from the picturesque note found in the great programmatic pieces.

    For those who love Delius of the “abstract” music best, this was, indeed, an ideal concert; and with Tasmin Little and Piers Lane also playing the Third Violin Sonata, there was no escaping the sense of a corpus of chamber music equal at least to Elgar’s, yet still neglected.

    The Third Sonata of 1930 was Fenby’s transcription; its limpid rhythms and touches of pure Delius in the scherzo’s mono mosso were an apt memento to the amanuensis. His role as a vessel for such inspiration implied a mentality the opposite of his atheistic master’s. You could tell as much from two Fenby originals with holy words’ and themes. A set of evening canticles, though written in 1932, bore no trace of pagan Delian harmonies.

    In For Music on the Eve of Palm Sunday from the same year, also superbly revived by The Elysian Singers of London, conductor Matthew Greenall, a mood of sadness was not just part of the text in question. It was a touching piece, and one that made you wonder about the price of devotion to genius.

    Nicholas Williams