Works for Violoncello & Orchestra

»The greatest artist on the violoncello produced by our century«: this was the headline in a Cologne newspaper following the sudden death of Adrien François Servais. Testimonies by his contemporaries also confirm that Servais was the most famous cellist of his times, and already during his lifetime Berlioz and Rossini termed their fellow musician »the Paganini of the cello.« Moreover, a monument in noble Carrara marble was erected to Servais, as the first member of his musical guild, on the main market square in his hometown of Halle, Belgium. Servais indeed performed the valuable service of revolutionizing cello playing and taking it to new, previously unimagined heights. He must have also been the first cellist to perform exclusively with an endpin. He spread this innovation internationally on his European tours and with the help of some of his students. His romantic works are distinguished by charm and sophisticated irony as well as by extreme technical demands - such as those in the Souvenir de Spa, op. 2, a fantasy from 1844 with which the young Pablo Casals rendered breathless and speechless a snooty Servais successor in the post of Brussels cello professor. Wen-Sinn Yang, the interpreter on the present recording, confirms its difficulty: »Tchaikovsky's highly virtuosic Rococo Variations are child's play by comparison.«