This is the first modern recording of Sir Donald Tovey’s Cello Concerto written in 1931–4 for his friend Pablo Casals who gave the first performance in Edinburgh in 1934. It is on a grand scale, lasting 54 minutes. Tovey was a great musicologist but this is not mere academic music. Its serene opening theme for the cello is a memorable inspiration and reappears as effective contrast to the stormy material of much of the rest of the movement. Tovey’s orchestration, sometimes reminiscent of Elgar, is never thick and cloying and allows the soloist full reign. The slow movement is a dark and sombre elegy, harmonically more adventurous than the rest of the work and rising to a passionate climax. The finale develops into an argument between soloist and orchestra that is both witty and dramatic. Alice Neary plays this demanding work with immense skill and dedication, and she is impressively supported by the Ulster Orchestra conducted by George Vass. The disc also includes a charming Air from an early quartet and recently arranged for orchestral strings by Peter Shore and the Elegiac Variations for cello and piano (Gretel Dowdeswell) which Tovey wrote in 1909 in memory of the cellist of the Joachim Quartet. A revelatory issue.
*****
Michael Kennedy, The Sunday Telegraph
Donald Tovey (1875–1940) will always be remembered as one of the UK's finest writers on music, though in his day he was also admired both as composer and pianist. He was a favourite accompanist of Pablo Casals, who gave the premiere of his Elegiac Variations in 1909, and for whom Tovey also wrote his Cello Concerto in 1933. The Concerto's notorious length – nearly an hour – proves its undoing. The central sections have great lyrical and emotional strength, but Tovey's carefully wrought, Brahmsian idiom often sits uneasily with his quest for structural expansiveness, and the outer movements are worryingly diffuse. The Variations, self-consciously peering back through Brahms to Schubert, occasionally sound derivative, but are also infinitely more satisfying in their compressed austerity.
Alice Neary is the intense, persuasive cellist in both works, though neither she nor her excitable conductor George Vass can disguise the Concerto's flaws. Gretel Dowdeswell is the weighty, impressive pianist in the Variations.
The Guardian
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Customer Comments
"Back in 1975 and the days of open-reel recording I taped off the air a centenary performance of Tovey's Cello Concerto. Thirty years later, long after tape and tape-recorder were history, I could still effortlessly recall to mind the Concerto's glorious opening theme, as memorable as that of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, and not dissimilar in mood. The commercial recording at last of this wonderful work alone amply justifies Toccata's existence – thank you and bring on lots more!"
David J. Brown
