The Strad Recommends: Jean-Guihen Queyras: C.P.E. Bach, Kraft

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: September 2024

Description: Plenty of contrast on a deliciously unorthodox Classical-era album

Musicians: Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello) Ensemble Resonanz/Riccardo Minasi

Works: C.P.E. Bach: Cello Concerto in B flat major Wq171. Kraft: Cello Concerto in C major op.4

Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM902392

This short but rewarding CD contains two exquisite performances of concertos from the Classical period some 50 years apart, taking us from its early days with C.P.E. Bach and his sensitive (Empfindsamkeit) style to the more melodic-based writing of the virtuoso cellist Antonin Kraft.

As well as inspiring Haydn’s D major Cello Concerto, Bohemian-born Kraft – the foremost cellist of his day – studied composition with the master. Kraft’s own C major Cello Concerto shows valuable lessons learnt in keeping the audience with him through humour and catchy, singable melodies.

French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras plays the intricate and virtuosic solo part, with its stratospheric semiquaver runs and shimmering tremolando double stops, with grace and jaw-dropping facility. The E major Romance movement is most affecting, the sweet tone of Queyras’s 1696 Cappa cello singing out sweetly high up in thumb position.

Whereas much of Kraft’s solo part is in a high tessitura, C.P.E. Bach’s concerto of 1751 focuses on the cello’s middle range, and is more motivic than melodic. This is a performance of palpable energy and exuberance, the recorded sound real and immediate. The composer’s unconventionality and love of drama is to the fore in the Adagio, in which the gentle, hesitant soloist is pitted againt stormy and assertive strings in a dialogue of contrasts.

JANET BANKS