イン・メモリアムI

オランダが誇る名チェリスト、ピーター・ウィスペルウェイが60歳を迎える半年前の2022年3月に16歳の若さで突然この世を去った息子ドリアンへ捧げた「イン・メモリアム」シリーズ!第1巻の本作には過去にパオロ・ジャコメッティと取り組んだシューベルトとブラームスのレコーディング・プロジェクトから、ドリアンの人生にも大きな影響を与えたというシューベルトの作品を抜粋。元々はヴァイオリンのために書かれた3曲と、フルートのために書かれた「《しぼめる花》の主題による序奏と変奏曲」をチェロの温かな音色で描いています。
東京エムプラス

The "in memoriam" in the title of this release by cellist Pieter Wispelwey and pianist Paolo Giacometti refers not to any aspect of Schuberts music but to Wispelwey himself and his recently deceased son. The music was recorded previously to this 2023 release but is not a reissue of an earlier album; the pieces by Schubert were extracted from earlier albums also featuring other composers and resequenced here. (A second In memoriam album, with Bach and Kodaly, is planned.) The Schubert pieces are arranged for cello and piano from other media, and one pleasure of the material is how well Wispelwey has accomplished his task as arranger; the challenges posed by the change in register in the opening Introduction and Variations on Trockne Blumen, K. 802, originally for flute and piano, are quite elegantly handled. The ordering of the pieces seems to embody a passage from death to life, with the variations on the grim song Trockne Blumen ("Dry Flowers") giving way to a sonata and a short rondo before the freer Fantasy in C major, D. 934, originally for violin and piano and again artfully arranged. In the performance here, the Fantasy does take on a life-affirming quality. These recordings, when they were originally made, had an unpleasantly breathy, close-up quality, and nothing seems to have been done to improve that, but they do represent a moving repurposing of earlier music-making in commemoration of a tragic event. ~ James Manheim