Jean-Guihen Queyras - Britten: Suites for Cello Solo (2011)

Written between 1964 and 1971 for Britten's friend Mstislav Rostropovich, these suites exploit every resource of the instrument and require utmost technical, intellectual, and musical proficiency from the player. Though they share a certain austerity and love of sound effects, each has its own character and structure. The first frames three pairs of contrasting movements with a recurring ostinato; the second opens with declamatory conversations between the cello's low and high registers and demands pyrotechnics-like chords, double stops, simultaneous bowing, and plucking; the third alternates plucked and bowed passages and features extreme contrasts of character, dynamics and moods. Young Jean-Guihen Queyras, a multiple prizewinner with a burgeoning European career, surmounts all these formidable hurdles without strain, playing with an unfailingly beautiful, pure, variable tone, and total authority and involvement. --Edith Eisler