Natalie Clein

I think it's a review of Natalie's Kodaly CD on Amazon in which the release is praised for not trying to sell itself with pictures of the musician on the cover. It wouldn't need to, and although it might be said that her other records do feature her draped over the cello or looking nice, that's mainly because that's what she looks like and Julian Lloyd Webber doesn't.

And I'd like to establish from the start that I haven't bought all of Natalie's CD's for the pictures, either. I have discs of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and I didn't buy them because he looks gorgeous.

I've seen her two times. The first was in Fairford Church a few years ago now when she filled the cosy acoustics with Bach Suites with an unforgettable tone. At another end of the spectrum, in the Cadogan Hall Prom this year, it was passsionate Tavener and idiosyncratic Gubaidalina. You can't choose between such ends of a scale but both were tremendous. And so, finding that her recording career so far began rather more ordinarily with Brahms, Schubert and Rachmanninov could have been slightly underwhelming.

The Brahms Schubert set from 2004 includes the Schubert sonata for arpeggione which my forensic instincts deduce must have been what she played in Fairford because it says here that it is the only surviving piece written for that instrument that was invented, came and went, in a decade or two, only having had time to entice Schubert to write any surviving music for it. Although the Brahms sonatas have their moments and provide eloquent discourse on their velvety way, it is the Schubert that charms the most.

The Romantic Cello looks at first sight like an alarmingly Classic FM marketing exercise but I'm sure the Chopin and Rachmanninov are given thorough seeing-to's, doing exactly what it says on the tin. So far, this is the disc I can find the least to like about but it's up against a couple of sensational recordings and it can be the case that those things that don't impress immediately reveal their secrets and power given further hearings and so I'm not dismissing it yet. It does cross one's mind that cello sonatas are not solo pieces but accompanied by piano and both Chopin and Rachmanninov are primarily regarded as piano composers and so I wonder if Natalie doesn't share the spotlight with the pianist, Charles Owen, rather more than the credits suggests.

I don't regard myself as much of an Elgar fan. With Purcell, Tallis, Byrd, even Handel if you will, and then William Boyce and any John Taveners or Taveners around, I couldn't promise the Worcester man a place in my Top 6 English composers, but the account of the Concerto from 2007 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vernon Handley, who, as I have just checked, left us forever the following year, would be enough to convince anybody. Like the Bruch violin concerto, the piece has become one of those standards that familiarity can almost make you love and not notice both at the same time because it is taken for granted but this reading is sensual, beguiling and very wonderful indeed. Natalie says in her note it took her ten years before she felt she was ready to record it but then the moment came. And it was worth the wait. There is stacks of thought and feeling in it, both from Elgar, Natalie and presumably Handley, too. It's not very often I place an order on Amazon for a CD to be sent to someone else but I did it with this one.

Not only that, but the Salut d'Amour and Chanson de Matin are beautifully realized, too, and valued here as much more than fillers.

Which leaves us with the latest release of Kodaly on Hyperion. And, finally, something dark and dangerous. While placings in the Classic FM chart no doubt pay the bills and afford a nice new frock or two, it must be the genuine artistic purpose of the real musician to take on pieces like this half hour solo sonata of C20th Hungarian 'sturm und drang' . When German Romantics thought of the idea of such 'storm and stress' in the late C18th, it wasn't their fault but they had no idea what the C20th was going to be like. Was it Theodore Adorno who pronounced that 'no poetry could be written' after such things as the holocaust or the 'World' Wars. Well, wrong again, you silly old Marxist theorist. You didn't realize quite how hard and resilient we could be, even as early as 1915. And here, Natalie goes into that darkness, as Tasmin did with the Bartok last summer, and brings us shocking richness to show that we are not finished yet and have somehow come out on the other side, sadder no doubt, but intact. Much of the credit in this case goes to Zoltan Kodaly, of course, but it is to be hoped that Natalie will go on and record more of this part of the repertoire as well as the lyrical Romantic pieces.

And if it were possible to place an advance order for her recording of the Bach Suites, to put next to Pablo Casals and Paul Tortellier, then I would but Amazon don't have the facility to take orders for things that haven't been done yet.