The Cello has been my favourite instrument since hearing Elgar’s Cello Concerto for the first time as a young child. There’s something about its tone, texture and the extremes of its reach that (for me) conveys the spirited highs and aching lows of the human soul. I would have loved to have learnt to play it, but sadly that wasn’t an option as it was too heavy/expensive for my parents to consider, so the violin it was, mainly because I could inherit my father’s violin. Or at least temporarily inherit it, since my parents decided to sell it a few years ago without telling me. Anyway, now I’ve got that grievance out of the way, this is a rather lovely double CD compilation of Cello Adagios. Or rather, Cello pieces that err on the side of quiet and gentle – only four of the 33 tracks are technically ‘Adagio’. There are some usual suspects here: Elgar’s aforementioned, Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, the adagio from Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, Faure’s Elegie, Massenet’s beautiful Meditation from Thais, and Saint-Saens delectable Swan from Carnival of the Animals. There are a few cheats as well, as in arrangements of well-known ‘adagio-like’ pieces arranged for Cello, such as Bach’s Orchestral Suite No 3 – otherwise known as Air on a G String, Debussy’s Clair de lune and Chopin’s Nocturne. They all sound achingly lovely and are arranged and orchestrated so perfectly that if you didn’t know the piece you’d mistake them for being written for the Cello. But perhaps the highlights of this compilation are those lesser known pieces (at least to me), such as: Ernest Bloch’s Prayer, Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei (the Hebrew prayer for Yom Kippur), and Sicilienne by Maria Theresia von Paradis. A woman! #cello #celloadagio #celloconcerto #classicalmusic #mariatheresiavonparadis #compilationalbum #nowplaying #nowlistening #recordcollection #randomrecordreview https://www.instagram.com/p/CEpg2wXJ6ut/?igshid=qffvd58pafw
