There's a lot to be said for this album as an actual pedagogical device -- buy one for the young cellist in your life. In a world where the musical tuition of young people is too often standardized and dull, this disc has a touch of the eccentric, of the personal, of the kind of music teacher you tell stories about years after the fact. It offers 30 short pieces suitable for the student cellist, with piano, mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They begin with a short work played entirely on the open strings of the cello and with one hand on the piano, moving up to recital-level works -- and then concluding with a set of pieces dedicated to the son of cellist
Steven Isserlis. One humorous ghost story with narration is composed by
Isserlis himself, and another by pianist
Stephen Hough.
The best thing about the disc is that it includes not only famous short cello pieces but also, as
Isserlis says, "more or less unknown pieces that somehow caught our fancy." The 48-second Lulu Waltz of
Sibelius is a charming snatch of melody that distills the quiet elegance of works like The Swan of Tuonela down into a few gestures, and even the very easy pieces will hold a listener's (or a parent's) interest. Everything is introduced in detail in the rather snarky booklet notes, with emphasis in many cases on stories behind the pieces or on how these two musicians happened to encounter them. The sum total is an impression of two adult musicians immersed in a vital web of connections and in a spirit of exploration -- an impression guaranteed to further the education of any young cellist.