Alfred Schnittke (1934 - 1998) - Cello Concerto No. 1 (1986) I. Pesante. Moderato [0:00] II. Largo [14:58] III. Allegro vivace [25:22] IV. Largo [28:55] Natalia Gutman, cello USSR Ministry of Culture Orchestra, Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1986) Alfred Schnittke's Cello Concerto No. 1 is a work in four movements typically lasting around 41 minutes. "'I have no sense of the fatal inevitability of evil, even in the most terrible situations. There is no such thing...' From the sound of his music, one would never guess that Schnittke had 'no sense of the fatal inevitability of evil'; his works seem to profess a faith in disaster that would shame Beelzebub himself. And yet one gets occasional intimations that the strength required to so feverishly preach the catastrophic could only be derived from a strangely safe haven, a stance of staunch if secret optimism. Hence when Schnittke had his first major stroke in the summer of 1985, one imagines the particularly cruel toll it must have taken. Having been declared clinically dead -- his heart stopped beating three times -- Schnittke eventually recovered into an enormously creative 'late phase' of composition. But something had changed in the music, almost polarized. The sick fun of doom and debacle was gone, replaced on the one hand by a more tortured and unfathomable darkness, and, on the other, by an almost sublime new simplicity, cryptic and imposing. The First Cello Concerto is an extraordinary work just on its own merits, but also happens to have been written during the summer of 1985; it was composed both before and after the stroke, and so bears the remarkable role of fulcrum in Schnittke's career. Even more so than the celebrated Viola Concerto, completed just days before the affliction, the First Cello Concerto is a touched work. A monumental endeavor for huge orchestra, in four movements and lasting some 40 minutes, the concerto was written for Schnittke's close friend, Russian cellist Natalia Gutman; the solo part is indeed feverish, and exhausts the performer both technically and emotionally. The work in general -- at least in its first three movements -- largely adheres to Schnittke's concerto-archetype of "I-against-the-World" (as scholar Richard Taruskin writes); the soloist ever-seeks to weave a sincere, plangent melos, to sing and weep its uninterrupted fill, and perpetually suffers both the mockery and raw violence of the orchestra. Thus the first movement founds its vast sonata-form around the conflict of soliloquy vs. blitzkrieg; the following Adagio resurrects the soloist into ephemeral lyrical fabric which is eventually stretched and torn; and the brief and bitter third movement casts the cello through a gauntlet of hopelessly fated march-pastiches and mock-heroics before obliterating ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTt3cG2nT0g

Frank Bridge (1879 - 1941) - Isabella, H. 78 (1907) BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Richard Hickox (2000) Isabella is a symphonic poem by Frank Bridge based on John Keats's poem of the same name. Typical performances last around 18 minutes. "Romantic images of the night, of dreams and ghostly happenings, re-emerge in [Bridge's] second Symphonic Poem, Isabella, which he completed in January 1907. Henry Wood conducted the first performance at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert on 3 October 1907. No orchestral work by Bridge follows so detailed a narrative as Isabella. It is based on Keats’s poetic version of the gruesome Florentine tale by Boccaccio. Isabella is in love with the handsome Lorenzo. When her two merchant brothers discover this they lure him into a forest and murder him. In a dream at the ‘dull of midnight’ Isabella is visited by Lorenzo’s ghost and, taking her nurse with her, she rides into the dark of the forest, digs up her lover’s body and places its decapitated head in a pot of basil. Later the brothers steal the ‘horrid thing’ and Isabella, heartbroken, ‘dies forlorn, imploring for her basil to the last’. Taking the Lisztian model once again, Bridge’s treatment is more richly scored and tightly constructed than Mid of the Night. Particularly impressive is the way in which Bridge unfolds and combines the two themes associated with the lovers – Lorenzo’s heroic horn call and Isabella’s tender oboe melody – into a radiant climax. Their transformation into a spine-chilling midnight ride, the moment of the murder of Lorenzo, and his ghostly appearance at Isabella’s bed-side could hardly be more vividly portrayed. The final transformation of Isabella’s theme into a haunting minor-key lament reveals just how much Bridge had learned from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. In the final apotheosis tragedy gives way to tender resolution as the lovers are reunited in death." (source: Chandos) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZUEaSFrO5g