Adrian Bradbury: The Pre-Raphaelite Cello

The Strad Issue: August 2024

Description: A heartfelt tribute to the British cello icon Beatrice Harrison

Musicians: Adrian Bradbury (cello) Andrew West (piano)

Works: Music by Becker, Grainger, Knorr, Quilter and Scott

Catalogue number: SOMM SOMMCD0685

The music on this unusual disc centres around Beatrice Harrison, the prominent cellist of the early 20th century whose celebrated recording with a nightingale was first broadcast by the BBC a hundred years ago.

Harrison was befriended by composers Grainger, Scott and Quilter, who had studied in Frankfurt under Iwan Knorr in the 1890s and went on to write and arrange music for her. Eleven of this CD’s 16 tracks are first recordings, many from manuscripts which languished for decades in the Harrison family’s barn.

The ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ title was used by Scott and Grainger for the music of their group, also known as the ‘Frankfurt Gang’. Whereas the earlier artistic movement had advocated returning to realism and nature, the Gang placed the emphasis on emotion above form and structure.

There is certainly plenty of emotion in Grainger’s well-named Youthful Rapture, and Bradbury, a seasoned chamber music performer, plays the high octaves and impassioned lines with great intensity, captured by the warm, full recorded sound. He plays Liebesleben, by Harrison’s teacher Hugo Becker, with a full-bodied tone, using the bow expressively in a way the composer would have taught her.

After a series of wistful, drooping short pieces by Quilter, given with sensitivity and well-chosen rubato, Scott’s pieces feel rather revolutionary, using the cello in imaginative ways, including glissando double-stopped pizzicato and sul ponticello.

JANET BANKS