Matt Haimovitz THE 20th CENTURY CELLO

The sound on this disc is absolutely stunning – and the playing is pretty impressive too: but what about the music? Matt Haimovitz's first DG disc of twentieth-century unaccompanied cello works (1/92) emphasized the relatively recent past, with Britten's Suite No. 1, sonatas by Crumb and Ligeti and only a Suite by Reger from the century's early years. This time about half the disc is given over to Kodaly's amply proportioned Sonata (1915), which also featured in a no-holds-barred account on Pieter Wispelwey's relatively recent disc.
While I can't say that Haimovitz has fully won me over to this work, I am in no doubt that this is how it should be played – with a spontaneity that never lurches into mannerism, and with supreme technical control: the dynamic shading of harmonics and the fluency in passages exploiting opposing extremes of register are such as to make lesser cellists give up in despair. So, even though it is disappointing that this disc brings no previously unrecorded music into the catalogue, it makes a distinguished contribution to an increasingly crowded field.
In 1992 I thought that Haimovitz was rather too flamboyant in Britten's First Suite, but the concentrated forms and predominantly dark moods of No. 3 are finely characterized here, in a reading to rival that of Kim Bak Dinitzen (part of a two-disc set) or any other currently available version. The short pieces by Berio and Henze, whose original versions were part of the Rostropovich-inspired seventieth birthday tribute to Paul Sacher, have recently been recorded (on a two-CD set) by Patrick and Thomas Demenga in the context of all 12 tributes. Once again, however, Haimovitz's superfine technique, and the exceptionally faithful DG sound, make these performances outstanding, and the Berio, in particular, is a small masterpiece.' (Gramophone)