Daily album review 8: Cellist Steven Isserlis and composer Thomas Adès a colourful match

The combination of the world’s most charismatic living cellist Steven Isserlis with open-hearted living composer Thomas Ades makes for 77 minutes of compelling musicmaking on a new album from Hyperion.

The disc is a varied recital programme of largely lesser-known pieces structured in a way that builds thematically and sonically to the world premiere recording of Lieux retrouvés, a four-movement sonata for cello and piano Adès wrote for Isserlis.

Isserlis teases infinite shades of colour and intensity with his bow. He would make playing scales sound captivating. But the music Isserlis has chosen for this album is already laden with expressive possibilities, which the cellist exploits greedily.

Adès is Isserlis’ willing partner in the journey, providing brightly shaded, nimble-fingered piano accompaniment not only in his own piece but also on a fleet but beautifully nuanced reading of Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 2, which comes from his more experimental final years.

Also from the early 1920s is Pohádka, a three-part tale in music by Leos Janácek that is another brilliant display of how economy of means doesn’t have to translate into a shortage of expressive potential.

I can’t warm up to the noodlings of Franz Liszt’s dotage, but, for those who love them, there are three choices from the composer’s turgid last decade. Rounding out the performances are four solo-cello meditations by still-living Hungarian composer György Kurtág, which seem a bit grey in the context of this otherwise colourful collection.

You can find all the details on the album, including Isserlis’s comprehensive background notes and conversation with Adès, here.

John Terauds