Brahms: Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor, Op. 102 / Dvorak: Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 (Recorded 1929, 1937)

"Casals's glorious Dvorak concerto, recorded in Prague in 1937, sounds as good as ever, or, rather, better: Naxos's remastering genius, Mark Obert-Thorn, has produced an amazingly rounded, detailed sonority. The great cellist sings this lovely work as perhaps nobody has, before or since, but his performance is, if possible, even more notable for its pulsating energy: listen to the rhythmic spring of the soloist's first entry. Casals's famous trio partners. Thibaud and Cortot, combine with him in an earlier (1929) recording of the Brahms double concerto, conducted by Cortot...full of lively music-making, in which Thibaud's silvery tone is an ideal foil for the cellist's burnished sound."
- The Sunday Times (David Cairns) March 11, 2001

"At Naxos' basement-budget price, this is one more treasure painstakingly preserved that anyone with open and adaptable ears can cherish as some of us always have-even when we've not heard it for years, even decades-but never before in sound as alive as this. Essential for any historical library that doesn't stop with stereo."
- Classical CD Review (RD) April 2001

two recordings represent several sides of the outsize personality we remember as Pablo Casals - although he himself would probably have preferred to be recalled as Pau, the Catalan version of his Christian name. Casals was a fervent Catalan nationalist and the first performance on this disc is a souvenir of his efforts to bring musical culture to the capital of Catalonia, Barcelona. It also reminds us how important friendship was to this difficult, single-minded, often stubborn man. For three decades he set aside part of each year for trio recitals with two French colleagues, the pianist Alfred Cortot and the violinist Jacques Thibaud. The trio's recordings are still selling, more than 70 years after they were made. No one thought of recording them in Beethoven's Triple Concerto but luckily Fred Gaisberg of His Master's Voice did make the effort to capture Thibaud and Casals in Brahms's Double Concerto. This work, written by the composer specifically to heal a breach between him and his longtime friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, has borne the stamp of friendship since its first performance; so what could be more natural than that our two string players should have their colleague Cortot, an experienced conductor, directing the orchestra for them? Choose for your orchestra the ensemble which Casals has relatively recently founded in Barcelona and of which his brother Enrique is the leader, and you have the recipe for an unusually fervent interpretation. We shall come to the miracle of the Dvorák performance in a moment; but first we should consider the phenomenon of Casals himself.