Cellist Pablo Ferrández Previews his New Album

The “mood lighting” that Nicolas Hudak arranged for his film of Pablo Ferrández’ video recital (from the YouTube Web page for that video)

This morning Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández presented a video preview of Reflections, his debut album with Sony Classical, which is scheduled for release this coming Friday. He played five selections from the album for a program that was less than twenty minutes in overall duration. He was accompanied at the piano by Denis Kozhukhin. Now that this preview has been live-streamed, it is now available on YouTube for subsequent viewing.

If the program was brief, it was still particularly well structured. The major work on the album will be Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 sonata in G minor; so the “core” of the program was a performance of the second (Allegro scherzando) movement from that sonata. In addition the entire program was framed by two of the twelve songs that Rachmaninoff has collected as his Opus 21. These selections did not require any arrangement for the cello; Ferrández simply played the vocal line.

Over the course of the entire performance, he only briefly addressed the audience. This was simply to say that his two favorite categories of music were Russian (hence the Rachmaninoff) and Spanish (his own nationality). As a result, the two selections on either side of the Rachmaninoff sonata movement were by Spanish composers. That movement was preceded by “Oriental,” the second of the 1893 Danzas españolas by Enrique Granados; and it was followed by “Asturiana,” the third of the Siete canciones populares españolas (seven popular Spanish folksongs) collection by Manuel de Falla. The “Asturiana” arrangement was prepared by Maurice Maréchal; and the Granados selection was arranged by Gregor Piatigorsky (who had previously performed on the instrument Ferrández was playing, the Lord Aylesford, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1696). (Fun fact: One of Piatigorsky’s earliest recordings, which was released in May of 1942, was of this Granados arrangement.)

Taken as a whole, this relatively brief offering served up a tempting taste of the entire album (which is now on my list of recordings that I plan to discuss at a later date).