Jeremy McCoyís new album, Dialogues with Double Bass presents a wide-ranging look at the double bass repertoire. The album highlights two particular themes. The primary notion is highlighting the bass as an equal voice in instrumental duos that are diverse and interesting conversations. A second theme is found in the vocal quality of much of the music. Like Bottesini, one of historyís most famous bass players, who earned his living playing in an opera orchestra, Jeremy McCoy is a seasoned member of New York Cityís Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (the orchestraís assistant principal bassist). The influence of great singing can be heard in McCoyís playing, in the way he shapes a phrase and in the varied tonal colors of his sound. McCoyís wide experience as a soloist, chamber player and orchestral musician, and the expressive range of his instrument, finds him right at home in this engaging collection of eloquent dialogues with the double bass.

Great works of chamber music by a master of melodies, performed by internationally renowned musicians - all the elements are in place for a feast of surprises on this recording. First up is a string quartet for violin, two violas and violoncello. Pleyel's String Sextet, a work that holds up well against other sextets from that time, was first recognized in the Hoffmeister edition published on 14 May 1791. Pleyel's four-movement Quintet in G minor with its surprisingly short and slow introduction could be described as "a prodigious and prescient romantic reconception." In this work, Pleyel did not comply with the dictate of fashion - instead of writing for the music market, he wrote for an audience of connoisseurs, availing himself of "the science of composition." As the musicologist and composer Vogler put it, "he can when he wants to." In all likelihood, the String Quintet has never been publicly performed and is therefore one of his (and not only his) most interesting string quintets.

Johann Matthias Sperger, the standout double bassist among the leading forces of the Viennese School in Germany, honored his instrument with greater virtuosity and more compositional versatility than any other composer. This fact is documented by his eighteen double bass concertos, all of which have come down to us in the autographic scores and in some cases in the parts and are available for consultation in the Schwerin Library. On Vol. 2, which features Concertos Nos. 1 and 8, Sperger once again gives the double bass the solo space it needs to display its song qualities, often with extremely striking and exceptional themes. And as already on Vol. 1, our soloist Roman Patkoló “does complete justice to what are sometimes the breakneck demands of the concertos” (klassik-heute. com of Vol. 1). The album also includes Sperger’s Symphony No. 15, a work that has a tonal language very close to that of Haydn – and that here is being performed and recorded on album for the first time, 239 years after its composition.

The music of the Ukrainian-born Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956) has been obscured by his association with the Russian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, but by the time they met in 1916, de Hartmann was already a hugely accomplished composer.

The two works receiving their first recordings here reveal a major late-Romantic voice, downstream from Tchaikovsky, a student of Taneyev, contemporary of Rachmaninov, and alert to the discoveries of Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The Symphonie-Poème occupies a vast canvas and requires a correspondingly huge orchestra, generating a monumental sense of scale from essentially balletic material. The lighter Fantaisie-Concertofor double bass and orchestra moves from tangy dissonance via a tuneful slow movement to a perky, folk-inspired finale.