For Steven Isserlis, usually on tour and suddenly alone at home, lockdown meant the chance to rediscover music he had in old boxes. British Solo Cello Music brings together works by Benjamin Britten, William Walton, John Gardner, Frank Merrick and Thomas Adès. Many have personal connections with Isserlis, recounted in a liner note full enough to act as a social history of 20th-century cello music.
The opening work is Britten’s Tema 'Sacher' (1976), a tiny, urgent piece written in the last year of the composer’s life. It provides a strong opening flourish to his mighty Cello Suite No 3 (1971). Isserlis brings all his intelligence and passion to this impassioned music but offers other moods too. Gardner’s intimate Coranto pizzicato (1968) owes a debt to Elizabethan lute music, while Merrick’s Suite in the Eighteenth-Century Style has echoes of the Bach suites (which, as Isserlis points out, were not well known when Merrick wrote the work, probably in the 1930s). The last track is Adès’s gem-like Sola (2000), the trigger for its writing so charming it’s worth buying the album to discover the full story.