Mime Yamahiro-Brinkmann, Björn Gäfvert, Karl Nyhlin - Cello Rising (2016) [Hi-Res]

Cellist Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann is regularly to be found performing with early music ensembles such as La Petite Bande, Bach Collegium Japan and the Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble in Sweden, meaning she’s no stranger to the recording studio. This, though, is her first solo disc, ably accompanied by Björn Gäfvert on a French double-manual harpsichord and Karl Nyhlin on a five-course Baroque guitar, and it’s a cleverly devised one: a sequential journey from the cello’s beginnings as a deep-voiced, mainly accompanimental instrument most likely to be found in cathedrals, through to its Rococo flowering as solo virtuoso instrument with upper-register fireworks. Date-wise, the works stretch from 1687 to 1771.

Two of the three earliest works are solo pieces by Giovanni Battista degli Antonii and Domenico Gabrielli milking the instrument’s sonorous depths; pre-dating Bach’s solo cello suites by a good 30 years, they’re played here with a beguilingly dancing lilt, enriched still further by her varied palette of articulation. Then, although the performances’ overall sense of fun occasionally erupts into roughness in moments such as in Boccherini’s Sonata in A major, with its fiendish extreme-upper-register finger-twisting central Allegro, this does rather fit with the mood. Indeed, sacrilegious to say perhaps, but I’m yet to find a recording of that Allegro that’s entirely easy on the ear; Andre Navarra comes closer than anyone but on a modern cello, and his piano accompaniment arrangement turns the work into an entirely different musical beast. Meanwhile, Yamahiro Brinkmann demonstrates elsewhere, such as in the B flat major Boccherini’s first Allegro and in Boismortier’s Sonata II in G, that she’s more than capable of controlled, fluttering elegance when the notes are coming thick and fast. ~ Charlotte Gardner, Gramophone