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Benjamin Britten: The Complete Music for Cello Solo and Cello with Piano

This is the first recording in one album of Britten’s Complete music for cello solo, and cello and piano, and includes the premiere recording of the unpublished Sonata for Cello and Piano in A. Written in 1926 when the composer was just thirteen, the manuscript is signed ‘E. B. Britten, Op. 42’ [sic]. The performance was prepared from a copy of the autograph owned by the Britten-Pears Foundation, which also gave permission for the first recording of the work. The autograph lacks any performance instructions, except for some slurs and a very few dynamic and articulation marks. The performance edition required careful reading of textual ambiguities in the autograph combined with an idiomatic approach towards fingering and bowing issues, appropriate to a work in Britten’s early style – still very much influenced by Mendelssohn and Schubert, yet with typically rich and varied phrasing structure.

The recordings of the mature cello repertoire draw on Ivashkin’s research into performance practice, and on his deep knowledge of Russian music and musicians. His liner notes discuss Britten’s various connections with Russia, based on largely unknown archival documents from Shostakovich and Rostropovich archives; the booklet also includes a page from the autograph of the Sonata in A. During the 1960s, Rostropovich recorded all these works except the early sonata and the Third Suite, yet he continued to develop different ideas about their interpretation, which he discussed with Ivashkin in private conversations between 1995 and 2007. Many of his recommendations and directions are followed in these performances. The disc-set as a whole is therefore an attempt to draw together Britten’s eclectic and highly personal idiom and the quite different Russian performance tradition with which his music was nevertheless closely aligned.