It is always interesting to see which music from presumably wide repertoires musicians choose to record. Natalie is staying in roughly the same late C19th/early C20th but moving from better known Romantic composers to what might be more personal choices, following a Kodaly set in 2010 with this pairing of two composers with explicitly Jewish cultural reference points.
Bloch's Schelomo, as could be said of all three of his pieces here, moves from a lonely searching mood to more passionate passages but it's unsettled music. If the contrasting moods are in some way compensation for each other, it is not for me a satisfying passion and 'tension' seems to be the apposite word that stays with me from the booklet notes that give detail of where the original texts were taken from. Although in no way avant garde, at least to our battered C21st sensibility, this isn't easy music, its dramas concentrated into bursts and rapidly-shifting directions. Longer deliberations that might dwell on the haunting slower tempi would suit me better but that is not Bloch's or Natalie's purpose here.
The Bruch piece, Kol Nidrei, is formed of two parts- the first (it says here) based on a C16th German synagogue chant and the second on Psalm 137. From 1881, and thus significantly earlier than the Bloch, it is still a more coherent whole, lyrical and inevitably perhaps devotional, and for me more successful. Natalie's most popular recording so far is ever likely to be her Elgar concerto with its gorgeous selection of fillers on the programme, too, but the lesser known parts of the cello library need investigating, too, and she is doing us a service in bringing to our attention, by which I mean mine, these things that I had no idea of. I was aware of a second Bruch violin concerto but not much more beyond that and, as I think I've said somewhere else quite recently, it isn't right for any artist to be known for only one work.
