Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk, Academy of St Martin in the Fields - For the Love of Johannes Brahms (2016)

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Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk, Academy of St Martin in the Fields - For the Love of Johannes Brahms (2016)

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Violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis are joined by two acclaimed musical forces - pianist Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, of which Bell is Music Director – in a landmark joint recording, For the Love of Brahms (Sony Classical). Available September 30, 2016, the new album is a unique project that features works of Brahms and Schumann that Bell calls “music about love and friendship.”

Bell, Isserlis and Denk unite here in Brahms’s first published chamber work, the Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8 in its rarely performed original 1854 version. Isserlis also joins Bell – as violin soloist and director – and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Brahms’s last orchestral work, the celebrated Double Concerto (for Violin and Cello) in A Minor, Op. 102. Bell, Isserlis and members of the Academy also offer the first recording of an unusual coupling: the slow movement of Schumann’s rarely heard Violin Concerto, in a version for string orchestra made by Benjamin Britten, who also added a short coda.

“I met Steven almost 30 years ago at a music festival, and he has been my close friend and frequent chamber music partner ever since. Jeremy and I have also shared a long-lasting friendship and we have recorded and performed together for more than a decade,” states Bell. “Therefore it is fitting that we all come together on this record to play music that is so deeply rooted in love and friendship.” Earlier this year, Bell, Isserlis and the Academy performed the Brahms Double Concerto to critical acclaim on an 11-date European tour, which Bell play-directed. The tour also featured the Schumann, and this recording followed. “Steven and I have performed the Double concerto of Brahms many times over the years, and I am so pleased that we found the perfect collaborators in the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields so we could finally record this piece that means so much to us,” adds Bell.

For the Love of Brahms continues Joshua Bell’s long and acclaimed partnership with the London-based Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Since 2011, Bell has been the orchestra’s principal conductor, succeeding its founder Sir Neville Marriner and the only other person to hold that title. Bell’s most recent Sony Classical recordings with the orchestra include Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a Bach concerto collection, and Bell’s first recording solely as a conductor, of Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies.

"Here’s an unconducted Double Concerto transformed into pure chamber music, in which two old friends spar amicably with the lithe support of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. There’s an intriguing, subtly competitive friction between violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Stephen Isserlis, the one so glossy and fluent, the latter more gnarly and individual, each audibly inspiring – and often provoking – the other"

BBC Music Magazine

Heartland American violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis have known each other for many years and have often performed together. This release, spearheaded by Bell in his post as music director of the venerable Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, is a bit unwieldy, but has moments that make it worth the time and money of Bell fans especially. The three works, loosely linked by the concept described in the title, have their background abundantly described by Isserlis in the booklet. The Double Concerto for violin and cello in A minor, Op. 102, is conducted by Bell from the violin. There are moments that show his star quality, contrasting nicely with the detailed, concentrated approach of Isserlis, and the relatively small size of the Academy probably approximates the way Brahms imagined the work. There are smoother versions of this curiously restrained, deliberate work, however. In the slow movement of the Schumann Violin Concerto in D minor, WoO 23, Isserlis takes an orchestral cello line as a solo for no very good reason. The album finishes strongly, however, with the original 1854 version of the Piano Trio in B major, Op. 8, which Brahms reworked in 1889 but did not, as Isserlis points out, discard (and he discarded plenty of other music). It's a passionate, tumultuous work of Brahms' youth, and Isserlis and Bell come together with pianist Jeremy Denk to make the best possible case for it. Sample the "Scherzo" with its daring rhythmic shift to waltz, and hear Bell's way with the expressive violin parts of the outer movements, and you'll come to understand Brahms' ambivalent attitude toward this early work. The 1854 version of the work is less often recorded than the 1889 reworking, and a fine, stirring performance of it is reason enough to pay the admission price here.

Review by James Manheim, Allmusic.com

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Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk, Academy of St Martin in the Fields - For the Love of Johannes Brahms (2016)

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Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, Jeremy Denk, Academy of St Martin in the Fields - For the Love of Johannes Brahms (2016)

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