Weinberg: Sonates voor cello solo

Mario Brunello

Arcana/Naxos A559
(86 Min., 22/03/2024)

*****

on LUISTER (September 2024)

by Wenneke Savenije

“In 1986, he became the first Italian to win the Tchaikovsky Competition for Cello, after which his career took off. Mario Brunello (1960) has performed as a soloist with orchestras such as the London Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, worked with conductors such as Valery Gegiev, Zubin Metha and Claudio Abbado and musicians such as Martha Argerich and Maurizio Pollini. In 1994, he founded his Orchestra d’Archi Italiana as a conductor, with which he has performed throughout Europe. He is also the artistic director of two Italian string quartet competitions. Despite all these successes, Brunello seems above all to be a musician through and through who has given his heart to the cello. In his case, to a beautiful seventeenth-century Maggini cello, which he plays as if it were his beloved. In 2010, Brunello recorded Bach’s Six Suites for solo cello. After that it remained quiet, but now he manifests himself again as a soloist in the Four Sonatas for Cello Solo by Weinberg. They are very strong pieces, which can be heard as musical cries from the heart in times of prosperity and adversity. Weinberg did not have an easy life, but he found his refuge in music.

Brunello seems to sense all the composer’s emotions flawlessly and gives them form and content in ‘narrative’ structures, with an expressive and warm tone, organic timing and a rich palette of colour nuances.”