Recording of the Week, Boccherini from Steven Isserlis and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Name two works by Boccherini…! OK, I know you can, but many people would rattle off the ubiquitous Minuet with ease and then rack their brains to find a second. Steven Isserlis is very aware of this, and his new recording ‘Music of the Angels’ with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment presents a selection of Boccherini’s works with cello in order to help round out the picture of this graceful, elegant composer. It’s a surprisingly chamber-oriented album, with even the two cello concertos inhabiting an astonishingly delicate, translucent sound-world (about which more a little later).

The first concerto makes a striking impression with some very high writing for the soloist, often duetting with the first violin on almost equal terms. It put me in mind of the great violist Lionel Tertis’s version of Elgar’s cello concerto (recorded last year by Timothy Ridout) – if I didn’t already know these were cello works, I could have been fooled into thinking I was hearing a viola.

There’s speculation that Boccherini would only have had one cellist in his ensemble for these concertos – so, logically, taking them out to play a solo line in the higher registers means there’s nobody left to provide the solid bass-line. Boccherini makes a virtue of this by having the solo passages accompanied just by two violins, one to a part – resulting in a deliberately, distinctively weightless texture (like those rare moments in the St Matthew Passion where the continuo drops out and the viola provides the bass line). Perhaps this is part of the origin of the description of Boccherini’s music as ‘music of the angels’.

In the C minor cello sonata, although the keyboard provides the kind of solid foundation that the concerto daringly foregoes, this tendency towards high melodic lines still gives rise to some almost eerie effects as Isserlis negotiates the strangely chromatic sliding material found midway through the first movement. It’s definitely not actually intended to represent anything supernatural and I wouldn’t want to suggest otherwise, but I found it pleasingly seasonal all the same. The F major sonata, on the other hand, is beautifully carefree; its brief slow movement is particularly special, with Isserlis unwinding ribbons of effortlessly relaxed filigree.

The benevolent influence of a noble musician-patron (like the baryton player Nikolaus Esterházy and the flautist Frederick the Great) gives us the large number of double-cello quintets, written for keen cellist King Friedrich Wilhelm, Frederick the Great’s nephew, and represented here by the early work in D minor G280. Not surprisingly the cellos enjoy an important place, with the violins often seeming to merely twitter decoratively around them.

I rather like the fact that even today, the exact composition of a string quintet remains up for debate, with at least three variants in fairly widespread circulation, and it’s interesting to hear what Boccherini does with the more bottom-heavy sound that the second cello offers. In a way it’s the opposite to the concertos – precisely because here he has got a ‘spare’ cello available to him, he can have both the grounding of a bass-line and also a lyrical singing tenor in the middle of the texture, rather than the airy sound that’s so striking in the two concertos. It’s a pleasant contrast and personally I have to admit I somewhat prefer this more ‘rooted’ sound-world.

Steven Isserlis is a man with a wry sense of humour – his programme-notes are dotted with witty asides including some puns that, frankly, stray into dad-joke territory. He gets the last laugh on the listener by selecting as his encore the very same Minuet whose over-use he has earlier bemoaned. Although he probably gleefully expects everyone to be sick and tired of this piece, it’s actually a surprisingly refreshing note on which to end – and it’s particularly good to hear it contextualised by the preceding five full-scale works rather than just wheeled out in isolation. The genteel lightness of its texture, today a byword for posh sophistication used to sell everything from cough medicine and mustard to Pepsi Max (other soft drinks are available), makes a lot more sense when you’ve heard those two ‘angelic’ concertos beforehand.

Steven Isserlis image credit: Joanna Bergin