Sonates pour violoncelle

Description

The immense Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk makes his grand return to chamber music, with his longtime collaborator, pianist Håvard Gimse. The program features two English composers, Benjamin Britten and his teacher, Frank Bridge, whose Cello Sonata was written during World War I and is imbued with despair and great emotional strength. Britten composed his Cello Sonata in 1961, following his meeting with Mstislav Rostropovich to whom he dedicated the work. Another traumatized by the 14-18 war, Debussy nonetheless wrote: "It was cowardice to think only of the horrors committed, without trying to react by reconstructing, according to my abilities, a bit of that beauty against which we are struggling." His Cello Sonata is the first of a series of six sonatas he had planned to compose, but he only managed to write three before his death. As a determined Moravian nationalist, Janáček does not call his 1910 three-movement work a "sonata"; he names it Pohádka (Fairy Tale) and draws inspiration from a poem by Vassili Zhukovsky.