Reinecke: Complete Cello Sonatas

The fundamentally Romantic idiom of Carl Reinecke coexists with the twilight of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century. He was a precocious and prolific composer, who wrote music from an early age after his birth in the North German town of Altona in 1924.

The last of his three cello sonatas was composed in the year of 1898 once he had retired from teaching duties at the Leipzig Conservatoire to become its director, while the first of them was composed in 1848, when Reinecke was serving as a young and brilliantly accomplished court pianist in Copenhagen. The trio of sonatas thus spans his maturity and effectively traces certain strands of his development as a composer. All three of them hew to the standard quick-slow-quick three-movement form in which the sonata's argument is outlined by a discursive first movement, deepened by a reflective intermezzo and rounded off with an extrovert rondo finale.

When it was belatedly published in 1855, the A minor Sonata won such popularity that Reinecke was soon asked to make a violin version of the piece. The dedicatee was Andreas Grabau, a cellist in the Gewandhaus Orchestra of which Mendelssohn was director, and indeed, the sonata rejoices in a quickness of thought and lively spirit which Felix would have recognized and appreciated.

The D major Sonata Op.89 was composed in 1866 and published by Breitkopf & Härtel with a dedication to Carl Voigt (either the founder-director of the main choral society in Hamburg or the merchant-husband of the pianist Henriette Voigt). Is this a 'midde-aged' Reinecke? Certainly the first movement stands back from the high drama of the First Sonata, or at any rate gives way periodically to a very cellistic mode of introspection, inviting comparison in this regard with the recently composed E minor Cello Sonata of Brahms.

In this regard, the dedication of the Third Sonata to the memory of Brahms, who had died in April the previous year, might be regarded as a hostage to fortune. Yet while a pall of introspection hangs over the recitative-like introduction, worthy of Brahms's own late Four Serious Songs, Reinecke was no slavish epigone, and the sonata is the work of a lifetime spent refining the craft of composition in himself and in others.

Carl Reinecke (1824-1910) was born in Altona, near Hamburg. Under his father's tutelage he studied the violin, but later turned his attention to the piano. He began to compose at the age of seven, and his first public appearance as a pianist was when he was twelve years old. At the age of 19, he undertook his first concert tour as a pianist. In 1843 he settled in Leipzig where he studied under Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. In 1847 Reinecke was appointed Court Pianist for Christian VIII in Copenhagen. After posts in Paris, Cologne and Breslau he was appointed director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra concerts in Leipzig, and professor of composition and piano at the Conservatorium. He led the orchestra for more than three decades, until 1895. He conducted the premiere of Brahms's A German Requiem.

Reinecke's style is firmly rooted in the German Romanticism, and he is a direct heir of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.
This new recording presents his three Cello Sonatas, full blooded romantic works in their sweeping passion and tender lyricism.

Played by Croatian cellist Ana Turkalj. She took master classes with Wolfgang Böttcher, Seiji Ozawa, Bernard Greenhouse and Nicolas Altstaedt, and is a winner of several international competitions. Pianist Aleck Carratta graduated with honours at the Conservatories of Hamburg and Zürich, and attended master classes of Lilya Zilberstein, Roberto Plano, Filippo Gamba, Aleksandar Madžar, and Christian Zacharias.