Edvard Grieg, arguably the most popular composer ever to emerge from the Scandinavian peninsula, made substantial contributions to the chamber music canon with his violin sonatas rather than with his works for cello: only one sonata for cello and piano (Op. 36) was written for this line-up. Daniel Müller-Schott, always driven to expand the musical repertoire for his instrument and with a keen sense of transcriptions, for this all-Grieg album – which is his 20th album on the label Orfeo – hence transcribed and recorded for the first time the violin sonata in C minor, Op. 45, No. 3, for the cello. Accompanied by his long-standing duo-partner Herbert Schuch on piano, the short Intermezzo in A minor (EG 115) guides us to the second part of the album, where the duo presents selected songs of various characters transcribed for cello and piano.

REVIEWS:

Cello originals and borrowings played with great allure… The instrument’s cantabile qualities ensure that the selection of Grieg song transcriptions works equally well, with Müller-Schott presenting a nicely wide-ranging choice.

-- The Strad

Edvard Grieg’s cello sonata ekes out a shadowy existence in his oeuvre. Daniel Müller-Schott and Herbert Schuch enter the music with the Allegro agitato in such a furious and energetic way that one is carried away by this inner fire and its power. Even in the Andante, for all its lyricism, there remains much nervousness. The finale is buoyant and dance-like, all nervousness has gone, but the energy remains.

Grieg himself considered the violin sonatas his most important works. Daniel Müller-Schott has rewritten the third for cello. Müller-Schott and Schuch play with the greatest expressivity, very full of contrasts, and thus create a tension even through the second movement that does not even dissolve in the Allegro animato.

Also in the smaller pieces, there are two Agitatos, so that even this part of the CD is not characterized by charm throughout. And so there is one thing we probably retain from this release: the exceptional energy and intensity with which the performers play their Grieg. I think even the composer would have been amazed.

-- Pizzicato

It is not by chance that luminous textures and sensual orchestral colors are considered essential features of French music. Its history features great names renowned for their art of instrumentation and sensitive use of timbres, who include the composers of the cello concertos on this recording: Camille Saint-Saëns, whose instrumentation technique always combines color with transparency, Édouard Lalo, who was highly esteemed by Claude Debussy for the wealth of color in his works, and Arthur Honegger, who painted striking soundscapes not only in his Cello Concerto but in his works without a large orchestra as well. Often it is the fine shadings and delicate transitions that characterize the tone colors of French music and are responsible for its delightful charm. Daniel Müller-Schott – Opus Klassik award winner 2019 – appealingly combines five works from the French sound kaleidoscope on his newest album with the DSO Berlin and Alexandre Bloch 'Four Visions of France’.

REVIEWS:

In every way, this is an impressive CD. It contains first-rate performances in excellent sound and has a most appealing programme. Included is a handsome booklet with photos and more than adequate notes on the works and artists. There is simply no reason to hesitate in adding this to your collection, if you are a cello aficionado.

-- MusicWeb International

After more than two decades in the spotlight, a still boyishly handsome Daniel Müller-Schott rightly remains one of the world’s foremost cellists, and a personal favorite of mine. He turns his attention here to chestnuts of the French repertoire, with most felicitous results.

The Saint-Saëns is of course the heavyweight entry in terms of standard repertoire status. Müller-Schott is on a plane with the work's finest exponents, giving a brisk and authentically French rendition, light and yet with dramatic flair. Equal credit in this regard is due to conductor Alexandre Bloch, who elicits an echt Gallic sound from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Much the same can be said of the other works featured here.

The recorded sound is excellent, the booklet notes (supplemented by artist bios) brief and to the point. This is a well thought out and beautifully realized release; strongly recommended.

-- Fanfare (James A. Altena)

Müller-Schott plays Saint-Saëns’ bravura test piece broadly in the opening Allegro, playfully in the Allegretto, and energetically in the closing Allegro. Later the Romance in F Major is tenderly executed by Müller-Schott. By contrast, the cellist’s take on the Élégie of Gabriel Fauré is all gentleness. His mining of the early 20h century sound in Arthur Honegger’s Cello Concerto bespeaks boldness and incisiveness.

When it comes to Édouard Lalo’s less-French than most work among those of his contemporaries: the Cello Concerto in D Minor, Müller-Schott embraces the grandiose, quasi-Wagnerian music with no small measure of impassioned fervor. Throughout all of the works featured in this interesting album, the soloist and his colleagues from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin play with commitment and unimpeachable style.

–Rafael's Music Notes

The two cello sonatas by Johannes Brahms are in very stark contrast to each other. This is not solely due to the more than twenty years separating the works. Brahms had a preference for pairs of works with the same instrumentation, which he frequently composed according to the principle of contrast. In the case of the cello concertos, it is above all the character and mood of the respective pieces that describe the contrasts. In the version for cello, the Violin Sonata op. 78, one of Brahms’ finest chamber works, supplements the two original cello sonatas in a charming way. Daniel Müller-Schott and Francesco Piemontesi team up once more for this all Brahms program after the great success of their release of cello sonatas of the 20th century (C872151).

REVIEW:

Poetry, power, and passion are all here, to an unquestionable degree. There were more times when I was struck by the piano’s beautiful tone than the cello’s, but at 44 Müller-Schott has grown into the kind of maturity that still expresses the joy of music in the face of temptations to become a much-in-demand professional repeating the same handful of popular pieces. I haven’t previously associated him with passionate playing, but he’s struck a bond with Piemontesi, whose Liszt can be quite ardent. Every desirable quality is present here.

– Fanfare

When the ORFEO label was established in Munich forty years ago, surely no one with the music scene back then would have predicted that the record company would develop into a firmly established player on the classical music market. One of the label’s main priorities in the early years was vocal music, with opera rarities top of the list and since the mid 1980s the re-use of historic tape recordings. Big names featured on the label’s own productions, while ORFEO also developed into a talent factory by discovering and nurturing young artist. This “ORFEO 40th Anniversary” 2-album sampler well reflects these two sides of the label by combining highlight tracks of historical recordings with today’s global stars.

During his long and exceptionally fruitful creative life, Richard Strauss (1864–1949) composed only a few works for the cello. Only three have survived and small as that number may seem, those cello works are critical to the composer’s development. Daniel Muller-Schott sees the early Sonata for cello and piano op. 6 and the late tone poem “Don Quixote” op. 35 as marking the path that was to lead Strauss within the space of a few years from Romanticism to the Modern era in music. The cellist highlights this watershed in Strauss’s artistic development with his own transcriptions, expressly made for this album, of the Lieder “Zueignung” op. 10/1 and “Ich trage meine Minne” op. 32/1.

This new release is an artistic game of interrelationships and transference. With his brilliant technique, Daniel Muller-Schott reveals two new cello concertos from the early Classical triumvirate of composers. Daniel Müller-Schott ranks among the world’s best cellists of his generation and can be heard on all of the foremost international concert stages. He has made his mark by delighting audiences for two decades “a fearless player with technique to burn” (New York Times). In addition to performances of the great cello concertos, Daniel Müller-Schott has a special interest in discovering unknown works and extending the cello repertoire, e.g. with his own adaptations and through cooperation with contemporary composers.

This new CD by Daniel Müller-Schott and Francesco Piemontesi offers three sonatas for cello and piano, works that sum up several chapters of 20th c. history that go far beyond the merely musical. Sergei Prokofiev displays a masterly serenity in his songlike Sonata in C, op. 119, composed in 1949. It makes evident his adjustment to the cultural politics of the Soviet Union – to which this world-famous composer had returned just twelve years before – but is also tailor-made for an exceptional cello-piano duo. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sonata in d minor, op. 40 is no less marked by fate. It was on the program of a concert tour given by the composer and his cello partner Viktor Kubatsky in 1936 when Shostakovich was put on the Stalinist index of undesirables, on orders from the very top. Finally, Benjamin Britten’s Sonata in C, op. 65 marked the beginning of a productive, creative friendship with Rostropovich that was established, despite many a problem posed by the Cold War, in Aldeburgh in 1961 when performed by the composer and Rostropovich.

Antonín Dvorák’s Cello Concerto is one of the absolute masterpieces of the genre, and every world-class cellist naturally takes it into his repertoire. This is also the case for Daniel Müller-Schott, who will be performing it in the great concert halls of Europe in 2014 and in the Lincoln Center in New York: thus in the very same city where Dvorák worked as conservatory director and where he wrote the concerto. Dvorák began his work in passionate, stormy mood, but completed it in lyrical, elegiac vein under the shadow of the illness and death of his sister-in-law Josefina, who had been his own first love. Müller-Schott’s new recording also includes several chamber music works and arrangements that offer insight as to how Dvorák gradually accustomed himself to the cello, up to the point when he composed his concerto in 1894-5. There is the catchy 'Rondo' that Dvorák wrote in 1892 for a chamber music tour, and 'Silent Woods', an arrangement made for the same tour, heard here in Dvorák’s own orchestral versions. Together with the pianist Robert Kulek, Müller-Schott has also recorded arrangements of the four Romantic Pieces op. 75 and of 'Songs my mother taught me' from the Gypsy Songs cycle. The latter is perfectly suited to the cello’s cantabile character and Daniel Müller-Schott’s interpretation.

Following up his recording of Britten’s Cello Suites, Daniel Müller-Schott is now exploring other areas of the repertory opened up by the legendary Mstislav Rostropovich. The Symphony for Cello and Orchestra was his first major work after the Cello Sonata of 1961.

REVIEW:

Having already given us Britten’s three cello suites, Daniel Müller-Schott here turns his attention to the composer’s Cello Symphony, putting him in a now four-way contest with Jamie Walton, reviewed by Paul Ingram in 33:1, Pieter Wispelwey, and Johannes Moser, the last two reviewed by me in 34:3 and 35:6, respectively. Britten’s Cello Symphony was not a work with which I was able to claim more than passing acquaintance before I received Pieter Wispelwey’s recording of the piece for review in 34:3. His performance with the Flanders Symphony Orchestra led by Seikyo Kim made a very deep and lasting impression on me. For his part, Moser turned in an equally searing account, though I found the West German Radio Symphony Orchestra Cologne under the direction of Pietari Inkinen not as gripping as the Flanders ensemble for Wispelwey.

Here we have the same West German Radio Symphony Orchestra as on Moser’s Hänssler CD, but under the baton of a different conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste. The question is: Can Müller-Schott match or perhaps even surpass Wispelwey and Moser’s intensely focused and emotionally draining performances? And if so, can the WDR Orchestra under Saraste match or surpass the same ensemble under Inkinen? The answer to both questions, I believe, is yes.

As the reader may be aware, Daniel Müller-Schott is one of my very favorite cellists among today’s top performing artists, and he doesn’t disappoint in this outstanding account of both works on the disc. Britten and Prokofiev, of course, present quite different musical narratives—the former, harrowing, hectoring, turbulent, truculent, and tragic, and while finally coming to rest on a major triad, not ending happily; the latter, for the most part, outgoing, sunny, and optimistic.

Alternately known as the Sinfonia Concertante, Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, op. 125, should, by all rights, be a darker and more depressing work than it is. It dates, after all, from 1951, a time in the composer’s life after he’d returned to Soviet Russia, was in declining health, and was being criticized by the state’s stoolies for writing music that didn’t promote proletarian values. The piece, however, betrays its past in happier days, for the Symphony Concerto is actually a reworking of a much earlier Cello Concerto Prokofiev had completed in 1938, a score bearing the opus number 58.

The pairing of these two works on disc is a bit unusual—I’m hesitant to say unprecedented—but it works well in that each, in a way, is the other’s alter ego. What they have in common, of course, is that both were dedicated by their respective composers to the celebrated Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. For the Britten, I think I’d still give a very slight edge to Wispelwey, whose performance of the piece is emotionally shattering. But Müller-Schott isn’t far behind, and the Cologne orchestra plays better for Müller-Schott under Saraste than it did for Moser under Inkinen. So, if you like this particular coupling, there’s no reason to hesitate. Recommended.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Elgar's defiant late work and Walton's richly atmospheric display vehicle have inspired Daniel Müller-Schott and André Previn - who was a personal friend of Walton - to collaborate on a recording that does full justice to the variety and uniqueness of these two masterpieces of English music.