Gal, Elgar: Cello Concertos / Meneses, Cruz, Northern Sinfonia

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GÁL Cello Concerto. ELGAR Cello Concerto • Antonio Meneses (vc); Claudio Cruz, cond; Northern Sinf • AVIE 2237 (61:48)

Receiving two very fine recordings of my favorite cello concerto, the Elgar, two issues in a row (see Fanfare 36:1 for review of Paul Watkins’s Chandos release) is enough treat in itself. But the real news here is the first-ever recording of Hans Gál’s Cello Concerto, composed in 1944 under very trying circumstances.

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that the booklet cover that displays through the jewel case’s front window lists the Elgar first, no doubt a lure based on name recognition. But it’s the Gál that comes first on the disc and is so confirmed by the booklet’s backplate that displays through the rear window.

Hans Gál (1890–1987) lived a long life but one filled with tragedy for a good part of it. An Austrian Jew, he was caught up in the Nazi vise, believing he’d be safe back in Austria after being dismissed from his post as director of the Mainz Conservatory in Germany. But the Anschluss soon brought Hitler’s storm troopers to Austria to round up and deport the Jews there as well. Gál and his immediate family were able to escape to the U.K. in 1938 before they were conveyed to a concentration camp, but trouble followed them across the Channel.

At first, Gál’s prospects brightened. Francis Donald Tovey invited him to Edinburgh to work as an archivist cataloging the Reid Music Library. But when Tovey was suddenly incapacitated by a stroke, Gál returned to London just in time for the outbreak of the war. Citing national security concerns, the Brits began rounding up German and Austrian nationals and sequestering them in detention camps. Gál was caught up in the sweeps and found himself interned in a camp on the Isle of Man, perversely incarcerated side by side with those from whom he’d fled. Upon his release four months later, he returned to Edinburgh. But by now, Hitler’s death camps, mostly in Poland, were working overtime, and members of Gál’s extended family who were still in Germany were at grave risk.

Gál’s mother, thankfully for her, died on her own in 1942, but in Weimar his sister and an aunt took their own lives to avoid deportation to Auschwitz, and that same year, Gál’s youngest son, Peter, who was physically out of harm’s way with the family in Edinburgh, committed suicide at the age of 18. Gál remained in Edinburgh where he was appointed lecturer at the city’s university, founded the Edinburgh Festival, and was eventually awarded the Order of the British Empire. He was also honored by the nations that would almost certainly have killed him had he remained. His cantata De Profundis was premiered in Wiesbaden, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Mainz and the Literis et Artibus medal by Austria.

Gál’s Cello Concerto is a work purely of the heart and soul, for no commission or even remote prospect of performance prompted it. Six years would pass before the work was first heard at a concert by the Göteborg Orchestra in 1950 with cellist Guido Vecchi playing the solo part.

Despite its 1944 date of composition, the concerto is as romantic a score as anyone could have made to order. Considering the circumstances under which it was written, it’s not as dark a work as Elgar’s World War I Cello Concerto. There are passages, however, of lament and exquisite, soaring lyrical beauty, and from time to time an exotic Middle Eastern element in the music comes to the surface that distantly echoes Bloch’s Schelomo and Voice in the Wilderness. The solo part in Gál’s concerto requires a good deal of virtuosic skill, but the work is not what you would call a virtuoso showpiece. For much of the score’s first two movements, the cello plays an almost obbligato role, dialoging with instruments in the orchestra in a pretty much equal engagement. It’s not until the concluding movement, in which the cello has an extended and technically challenging cadenza, that the writing highlights the soloist in a more traditional virtuoso concerto role.

This is a most magnificent addition to the cello repertoire, a work that, in my opinion, deserves to take its place beside the Schumann, Dvo?ák, and Elgar concertos as one of the cello’s great repertoire works. Antonio Meneses, unquestionably one of the instrument’s great players on the world stage, performs Gál’s concerto with breathtaking sweep.

Elgar’s Cello Concerto is well known and has been covered extensively in these pages. Therefore, I will restrict myself to telling you that Meneses’s deeply penetrating, intensely passionate, throbbing reading, supported by some of the most sympathetic orchestral playing from Claudio Cruz and the Northern Sinfonia I’ve heard in this score, goes straight to my 2012 Want List without passing GO.

This is an absolutely must-have disc, assuredly for the Gál, but also for one of the most beautiful performances of the Elgar you may ever hear.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins


Product Description:

  • Release Date: May 01, 2012


  • Catalog Number: AV2237


  • UPC: 822252223729


  • Label: AVIE


  • Number of Discs: 1


  • Composer: Hans Gál, Sir Edward Elgar


  • Conductor: Claudio Cruz


  • Orchestra/Ensemble: Northern Sinfonia


  • Performer: Antonio Meneses