Jan Vogler: My Cello Song Top Five
In an exclusive playlist, cellist Jan Vogler explores the theme of cello inspired by song: four recordings complemented by his own performances inspired by them, plus a Brahms orchestral masterpiece that shows the composer on unusually song-like form.
Read more…"My first choice is Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, which we know was inspired by a song. Dvořák had the idea to compose the concerto after he heard a cello concerto by Victor Herbert. But the actual inspiration came from his complicated relationship with the sister of his wife, with whom he’d had a lifelong friendship. She wrote to him from Prague to tell him she was seriously ill. Her favourite song was ‘Leave me alone’ – a love song that one only hears rarely – and Dvořák worked it into the concerto.
As a second piece I’d choose Schumann’s ‘Dichterliebe’, and the whole cycle as sung by Fritz Wunderlich. It really is one of my absolute favourite recordings, and has influenced me more than any other. Schumann’s my favourite composer, and one of the of the most underrated of the great composers – not very often played, and sometimes not very easily understood. ‘Dichterliebe’ is a key work, in which he uses small forms to shows in an amazingly direct and masterful way how you can express every shade of emotion. And the way that Wunderlich sings here in ‘Dichterliebe’: that’s how the cello of my imagination should sound – with a similarly wide dynamic spectrum and similar power, as well as this unbelievable sense of weightlessness, so that you forget entirely that an instrument is being played.
I was brought up in East Germany and next comes another recording that I marvel at, not least in the way it offers a bridge between East and West. I believe it’s a recording that was inspired a great deal by the fact fact that a great star of the West came to the GDR, and worked with a fantastic orchestra there. Jessye Norman and the Gewandhausorchester … in Strauss’s Four Last Songs. It’s a great recording, and especially the third song. The beautiful thing about it is that every musician in the whole orchestra was sent into a sort of musical trance by this voice – a typical kind of cross-inspiration. To complement it, there’s the cello solo in ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’, where it’s not a solo from the orchestra, as it were, but here really in competition with the singers – or that’s how I always found it with Giuseppe Sinopoli conducting. The accompaniment is written in such a way that the solo cello can really break out and take on a major role for a moment.
Another choice would be “Träume” from the ‘Wesendonck-Lieder’, which I recorded in the Henze arrangement – it was risky, but it worked really well. But for me the real classic in this piece is Elisabeth Schwarzkopf with Gerald Moore.
For my fifth choice, I’d like to pick a piece that I’ve just recorded, the Brahms Double Concerto – not our recording, but the wonderful recording with David Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich. This is quite unusual Brahms. Normally Brahms wins you over with the structure of his music, something which separates him from Schumann. But this isn’t a piece that is particularly “symphonic”; rather, it's one that wins you over instead with the attractiveness of its themes and melodies – which brings us back nicely to the theme of song!"
- Jan Vogler