Amit Peled, To Brahms, With Love, From the Cello of Pablo Casals, Brahms Cello Sonatas 1 & 2, Noreen Polera

In the classical world album ideas can either make sense or become a sort of marketing gimmick. Cellist Amit Peled's new album belongs happily to the first category. Its subtitle tells half the story, From the Cello of Pablo Casals, since for this recording Amit is playing the great Casals' 1733 Goffriller cello. The principal title of the album tells us the rest: To Brahms with Love (CAP Records 018-1). In fact this is a fine recording of Brahms Cello Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 by cellist Peled and pianist Noreen Polera.

As far as the cello goes, it sounds as wondrously full and deep as it did with Casals. Amit Peled soars high and far throughout, yet his emotional connection with the Brahms is a little bit more balanced and so sounds like a contemporary of ours rather than a product of an earlier generation. His playing is nuanced and exemplary. Noreen Polera on piano is a perfect partner in this endeavor, with classical balance and a lively repartee with Amit.

There have of course been some beautiful recordings of the Brahms sonatas. This one may not quite equal some of the more famous ones for extroverted virtuoso extravagance, yet because of that it gives us Brahms's compositional intentions all the more clearly, with attention and care for the totality.

The Second Sonata has long captivated me with its Apollonion exuberance and lengthy melodic intertwining of inspired thematics. The appearance of both sonatas in the last half of the 19th Century furthered the scope of Beethoven's work on the instrumentation, reaching further heights of long-form expression with Brahms' definitive entry into the fray. The two composer's Cello Sonatas set the bar high for dramatic and structural possibilities and influenced all that came in their wake. In both cases music was always the master. Difficulty and virtuosity were ever tied to the needs of a musical sounding of intelligence and a wrought complexity that ever seemed lucid and compellingly discursive. If there is never a doubt that the cello has the primary voice, the piano is never relegated to a mere accompaniment but instead flourishes on completely musical terms, as an independent weaver of corresponding lines and a principal realizer of the harmonic implications of the overall whole.

What strikes me especially at this point in my experience of the music is the remarkable organic pull to a seamless developmental whole, especially in the Second Sonata. Rarely do you encounter the sort of sequential busy work that marks less inspired developmental sections. It all seems a continuous saying, rather than a butchering of things into rigid sections. One follows the other in remarkable fluency and continuously significant phrasings, so that theme and development overlap into one long endless melody line. This is Brahms at his best.

And so we have two major chamber classics newly performed with a modern sensibility. There is a marked audio clarity to these recorded performances and an impressively rich cello sound. Peled and Polera give us performances that stand to become future benchmarks on what constitutes the present-day standard for Romantic Chamber Classics. Bravo!