DIALOGO

アメリカ出身のチェリスト、ジョン=ヘンリー・クロフォードのリサイタル・アルバム。
彼はスズキ・メソードの実践者であるヴァイオリニスト、ローラ・クロフォードを母に持つ期待の新人で、2019年「CRF=クラシカル・レコーディング財団」のヤングアーティスト・オブ・ザ・イヤーに選出されるなど、すでに高い評価を受けています。
このデビュー・アルバムでは彼の祖父がオーストリアから携えてきた200年前の歴史ある楽器を用いて、得意とする3人の作曲家の作品を堂々と演奏しています。
ブラームスとショスタコーヴィチで共演するビクトル・サンティアゴ・アスンシオンは室内楽を得意とするピアニスト。ピアノが活躍するブラームスでは息のあった共演を聴かせます。
ナクソス・ジャパン

Cellist John-Henry Crawford begins a note for this album with some high-flying prose stating that the concept of dialogue is vital to the fabric of our lives, our relationships, and even the progress of our society as a whole. Its not clear whether the music can live up to the concept here; dialogue, loosely speaking, is intrinsic to any cello-and-piano piece, but its only the Sonata for solo cello by Gyorgy Ligeti that really features a dialogue as the word is conventionally understood. However, the album is worth the listeners time and money for that work alone; it is not often recorded, and its terrific, especially in the sensitive, lightly humorous reading that Crawford gives it here. The sonata has an extramusical program; Ligeti imagined his crush at the time as a character in the drama unfolding in the opening movement, beginning out of sync with the main cello melody embodying Ligeti himself but then merging with it as the movement goes on. In the second movement, the two characters are more or less equal and independent. Of course, this is all unfolding on a single cello, inside Ligetis head, as it were. The Shostakovich Cello Sonata in D minor, Op. 40 also has a romantic (and Romantic) subtext, this time of a more conventional kind, and Crawford delivers a fine, lyrical performance, with a grasp of the very dark slow movement that prefigures the later Shostakovich. The Brahms Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 99 is dialogic in the sense that the piano has a completely equal role to the cello, and the performers catch the tension inherent in this structure. Pianist Victor Santiago Asuncion comes to the fore at times, and Orchid Classics lets him come up close to the listener. Its an exciting performance throughout that definitely marks its young players as musicians to watch.