An album with a hauntingly powerful message about our planet
The Strad Issue: August 2024
Description: An album with a hauntingly powerful message about our planet
Musicians: Trey Lee (cello) Georgy Tchaidze (piano) English Chamber Orchestra/Emilia Hoving
Works: Lintinen: Cello Concerto. Piazzolla: Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (arr. Lee). Schubert: Four Lieder (arr. Lee)
Catalogue number: SIGNUM RECORDS SIGCD791
This album is built around a concern for climate change, and constructed in three parts. First is the past, with arrangements for cello and piano of four Schubert songs corresponding to the seasons, eloquently performed.
At the centre are Piazzolla’s Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (‘The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires’) representing the present, with Lee directing the English Chamber Orchestra from the cello. His performance of ‘Autumn’ starts out vibrant, animated and spiky, before moving into lyrical playing of Piazzolla’s twisting line, with a yearning vibrato. Given their head, the ECO makes a convincing tango band. It provides a smoochy bed of sound in ‘Winter’, against which Lee rattles off some impressive pyrotechnics and unfolds some wistful melodic playing. Fittingly, ‘Spring’ is irrepressibly jaunty from everyone, rhythmically taut and compulsive, with some splendid portamentos. In ‘Summer’ the steady succession of thematic fragments leads into a warm, dreamy soliloquy from Lee, with a hectic acceleration to the finish.
Read: Seasons Interrupted: a cellist reflects on climate change
Read: ‘Art has the ability to make one look at the world from a different perspective’ - cellist Trey Lee
For the future there is Kirmo Lintinen’s Cello Concerto, written for Lee, a work specifically about climate change, which is explained in great detail in the booklet. He is an eclectic composer, drawing on classical, jazz and, in the second movement, pastiche Baroque. Lee gives it an impassioned and articulate performance. The recording is balanced and vivid.
TIM HOMFRAY
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