シューベルトの美しい歌心を堪能
チェロの温かい音色が沁みわたる名品集

2023年にウィスペルウェイが発表する「イン・メモリアム」シリーズの第1弾。今作は過去にリリースされたシューベルトとブラームスの録音プロジェクトから、シューベルトの作品を抜粋して再構成したアルバムです。どれも元は別の楽器のために書かれた作品でありながら、チェロの音色にも非常にマッチする美しい名品ばかり。ウィスペルウェイが厚い信頼を寄せるピアニスト、パオロ・ジャコメッティの伴奏も息ぴったりです。シューベルトの音楽は、音楽愛好家だったウィスペルウェイの息子にも大きな影響を与えたそうです。

「2022年、60歳の誕生日を迎える半年前に、息子のドリアンが亡くなりました。私も家族もたいへんなショックを受け、毎日が根底から揺らいでいる状態です。
音楽を通して、前向きで建設的な癒しをもたらすことが、私の進むべき道だと思います。」(ピーター・ウィスペルウェイ)
キングインターナショナル

発売・販売元 提供資料 （2022/12/26）

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 These recordings, when they were originally made, had an unpleasantly breathy, close-up quality, and nothing seems to have been done to improve that, but they do represent a moving repurposing of earlier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

Rovi