Daniel Müller-Schott / Francesco Piemontesi JOHANNES BRAHMS The Cello Sonatas

THE CELLO SONATAS

Daniel Müller-Schott / Melbourne Symphony Orchestra / Sir Andrew Davis RICHARD STRAUSS Don Quixote - Sonata for Cello and Piano - Songs Op. 10 and Op. 32

DON QUIXOTE

Daniel Müller-Schott / Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin / Aziz Shokhakimov TRIP TO RUSSIA

This new release features the willfully diverse compositional and emotional landscape of newly discovered and rediscovered nineteenth-century Russian music, performed with dedication and delight in the musics individual detail and perspective. Daniel Muller-Schott ranks among the worlds best cellist and can be heard on all of the foremost international concert stages. A fearless player with technique to burn (New York Times), he has made his mark by delighting audiences for two decades. Muller-Schott works with leading international orchestras: in the US with the orchestras in New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles, in Europe with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Radio Orchestras of Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Paris, the London Symphony, and more. In the present recording, he plays the Ex Shapiro Matteo Goffriller cello, made in Venice in 1727, and a bow made by FX Tourte of Paris in c. 1820.

Daniel Müller-Schott / Angela Hewitt BACH Gamba Sonatas

With performances as intellectual as they are musical, Daniel Müller-Schott and Angela Hewitt unite to produce a very worthwhile rendition of the Bach Gamba Sonatas. Hewitt, already an esteemed interpreter of Bach who has performed or recorded the complete works for solo keyboard, branches out here in a collaborative effort. All of her skills as an interpreter of Bach's solo works are indispensable here as the Gamba Sonatas are truly a collaboration of equals. Her touch is light and graceful without seeming timid or weak. The soloistic nature of her right hand brilliantly matches both the sound and temperament of Müller-Schott, and her accompanimental left hand is steady and elegant. Although Müller-Schott's release of the six unaccompanied Bach suites is a welcome contribution to the field, he is not known as much as a Bach interpreter as his colleague. Still, through self-proclaimed study and investigation, he presents a very satisfying blend of a Baroque sound and right-arm articulation on a modern instrument. In many ways, his playing is reminiscent of Anner Bylsma, but with a more focused core to his sound. In addition to the three gamba sonatas of the senior Bach, this album also includes the much more virtuosic and showy D major Sonata of C.P.E. Bach. Coupled with the wonderful playing, listeners are also treated to an excellent set of liner notes making this album a very wise choice. (Mike D. Brownell)

Daniel Müller-Schott / Angela Hewitt BEETHOVEN Cello Sonatas VOLUME 2

The mercurial partnership of Angela Hewitt and Daniel Müller-Schott brought ‘overwhelming intensity and emotional gravitas’ to a first disc of Beethoven’s cello sonatas. Here in a second volume they present two more of these ground-breaking masterpieces, together with the composer’s homages to Mozart and Handel—works which are equally important additions to the cello repertoire.

Hewitt’s characteristic digital dexterity and deep understanding of the classical style and Müller-Schott’s vibrant playing combine to create performances of great energy and sensitivity that will delight their many fans.

In a fascinating booklet note, Daniel Müller-Schott explores the evolution of Beethoven’s works for cello from a musician’s perspective, describing their revolutionary power and demonstrating the composer’s multifarious imagination [‘Mannigfachphantastische’].

'Once again Müller-Schott and Hewitt deliver strong and committed performances characterised by great attention to detail and wonderful musical interaction. The three sets of variations are projected with charm, elegance and virtuosity' (BBC Music Magazine)

'These performances are strongly characterised, clearly etched and full of life and drama. The account of the D major Sonata's great, sombre Adagio is powerfully eloquent … with Müller-Schott demonstrating a breathtaking control of subtle changes in tone and dynamic level' (Gramophone)

'Müller-Schott is certianly one of the finest cellists before the public today, and this is his core native repertory. The performances have the winning freshness of rediscovery' (The Sunday Times)

Daniel Müller-Schott / Angela Hewitt BEETHOVEN Cello Sonatas VOLUME 1

Angela Hewitt has taken time out from her impossibly busy solo concert schedule (including her stunningly successful Bach World Tour) to record a dazzling chamber disc with one of the greatest young cellists of today. Daniel Müller-Schott’s rise to fame has been well documented in the world’s press. His fastidious, clean-lined, yet energetic playing is the perfect foil for Angela’s particular artistry.

In their first Hyperion CD together, they present Volume 1 of Beethoven’s complete cello sonatas. Beethoven’s first three cello sonatas astonished his contemporaries with their dramatically innovative qualities. Before he wrote them, there were virtually no works in which the cello fully broke away from its subservient role of basso continuo to become an equal partner to the piano. They are works of extraordinary breadth and grandeur. Writing of the Sonata in A major Op 69, the two artists explain that ‘the dialogue between the two instruments reaches perfection, and demands the highest level of communication and expressiveness’. This is surely achieved in this splendid recording.

'In Hyperion’s first release in a Beethoven cello sonata cycle, Daniel Müller-Schott’s cello seems to hug you like a friendly bear … The disc collects the two Op 5 sonatas and the magnificent Op 69; cherish it most for the players’ teasing exchanges, for Hewitt’s nimble fingers and Müller-Schott’s golden warmth' (The Times)

'The success of this duo partnership is very evident in this first volume of Daniel Müller-Schott and Angela Hewitt's Beethoven cycle. They respond with imagination and flexibility to Beethoven's mercurial changes of mood, one moment tender and reflective, then bold and dynamic … A first class release' (BBC Music Magazine)

Anne-Sophie Mutter / Daniel Müller-Schott / André Previn MOZART Piano Trios K. 502, 542, 548 (CD 35 / ASM35)

Anne-Sophie Mutter describes Mozart as “the composer I have grown up with, who was always there waiting for me at every juncture of my career”; and she quotes with approval Tchaikovsky’s description of Mozart’s music as “filled with unapproachable, divine beauty”. For this latest instalment of her Mozart project, conceived to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, she has chosen the three finest works among his half-dozen completed trios for violin, cello and piano. In these, he developed the medium beyond its original conception as an accompanied keyboard sonata, giving the cello and, especially, the violin a much greater degree of independence, and so putting the latter on what Ms. Mutter calls “a level of equality” with the piano. She adds: “This is Mozart writing for pure enjoyment – his own included – in the best sense of the word.”

There is a hint that Mozart might have partaken of that enjoyment as a player in the postscript of a letter he wrote to his friend and fellow-Freemason Michael Puchberg in June 1788, around the time he completed the E major Trio, K.542: “When are we to have a little musical party at your house again? I have composed a new trio!” But his relish for private music-making during his later years in Vienna must have been clouded by his recurring financial problems. The same letter to Puchberg also contains a plea for a loan to be repaid over the next year or two, and for an immediate advance to help him out of a temporary difficulty. These three piano trios were presumably composed with the primary intention of improving Mozart’s long-term financial situation, since he sold them to his regular Viennese publisher Artaria: they were issued in November 1788 as his op. 15.

In fact, this set was completed at the same time as Mozart was composing his last three symphonies, nos. 39 to 41, which may also have been written with one eye on the possibility of publication. And, with the trios as with the symphonies, Mozart seems to have gone out of his way to create a triptych of pieces with strongly defined and differentiated characters – something which he ensured not least by his choice of keys.

The first of the three, completed well before the others in November 1786, is in B flat major – a key which seems to have been something of a favourite of Mozart’s, and one which usually conveys a sense of robust well-being. An oddity of Mozart’s use of it is the number of sonata-form first movements in B flat in which the first and second subjects are closely related, but a brand new theme is introduced at the start of the development section – as happens here, with the initial idea in sweet parallel thirds dominating the opening exposition section, and a new lyrical melody on the violin at the double-bar. The slow movement, in the warm, solid key of E flat major, is in triple time; its recurring main theme begins with an upbeat of three quavers (eighth-notes), and so do the themes of the subsidiary episodes, which makes possible some neat overlapping between sections and, later, between individual phrases. The finale has a main theme in gavotte time with two crotchet (quarter-note) upbeats; as Alfred Einstein pointed out in his study of the composer, this movement begins “like the rondo of a concerto, as if with a solo passage, piano, answered by a tutti passage, forte, but without any sacrifice of the finely wrought detail of chamber music”.

The key of the second trio, E major, is rare in the classical period and has something ethereal about it, as if its distance from more common tonalities removes the music from everyday reality. In the opening movement – in a smoothly flowing triple time, like the first Allegro of the Symphony no. 39 in E flat which Mozart also wrote in June 1788 – this feeling of remoteness is pointed up by an unexpected modulation towards the end of the exposition, from B major to the more down-to-earth G major; Mozart repeats this exactly in the recapitulation, from E to C, so that we can again enjoy the surprise, and appreciate the ingenuity with which he works his way back to his tonal starting-point. The delicate central movement, in a 2/4 version of gavotte time, is in a limpid A major, with a middle section in A minor which includes a haunting series of key-changes anticipating Schubert’s poetic use of modulation. The rondo finale, with its jaunty violin triplets and brilliant piano passage-work, makes a more determined attempt at jollity than the other two movements; but even here the violin’s C sharp minor melody in the central episode strikes a note of tender seriousness which is never wholly dispelled.

Mozart entered the last of the three trios in his catalogue of his works in July 1788 – less than a month before his last symphony, the so-called “Jupiter”, which is in the same open, serious, ceremonial key of C major. The first movement of the Trio indeed shows some affinities with that of the Symphony, in its strong opening gesture, followed by a gentle answer, and in the restlessness of its development section. The slow movement, like that of the Symphony, is an Andante cantabile in F major and in 3/4 time; its serene flow is merely ruffled by patches of lightly touched-in demisemiquavers (thirty-second-notes), but is disturbed for a moment by the sternly dramatic octaves after the half-way double-bar. The last movement, rather than adopting the sonata form and fugal texture of the “Jupiter” finale, is a rondo in dancing 6/8 time – though it is still closely worked in the manner of the Symphony, with the arpeggio figure of the main theme passed round all three members of the ensemble almost to the end.

Anthony Burton