Premieres
The three works on this disc were all commissioned for Yo-Yo Ma. Listening to Leon Kirchner's Music for Cello and Orchestra put me in mind of Mahler. Indeed, had Mahler lived long enough to hear and be influenced by the Berg Violin Concerto and decided thereupon to write a cello concerto for Feuermann, it might have sounded a bit like Kirchner's darkly passionate score. Both the Rouse and the Danielpour pieces are meditations on death, each lasting about half an hour. They are different in character but as compelling and vivid as the soloist for whom they were intended. Capturing these accounts was a heroic undertaking for Sony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and all the participants--the takes were recorded during the blizzard of 1996, when two feet of snow blanketed the East Coast. The venue was the Giandomenico Studios in Collingswood, New Jersey, and the sound turned out to be first-rate.--Ted Libbey