Bradley Cooper is a maestro with this Leonard Bernstein biopic, but Carey Mulligan is outstanding

If you’re not careful, “you’ll die a lonely old queen”. That’s a warning from Felicia Montealegre to her husband, iconic American , composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, in the second half of Bradley Cooper’s extraordinary new film, Maestro.

And sexuality is a hugely important part of this latest feature from Cooper.

I haven’t seen his take on A Star is Born – I am only really familiar with him as Rocket Raccoon – forgive me! But on the basis of this, he is a seriously creative director and writer, and a very fine actor too.

It’s less about Leonard Bernstein as a composer/conductor, and more about his relationship with his wife, Felicia.

That was complicated, because although he very clearly and genuinely loved her, he was also bisexual and not monogamous. She accepted this – and in way that was not passive. In terms of that quote at the top of this review, what struck me so forcefully is that it’s only in relatively recent years that ‘bisexual’ has been more regularly used (though the word was coined in the 19th century).

For many, if attracted to the same sex, it was assumed that, even on spectrums, they were still ultimately and essentially ‘gay’.

A bit like the phrase ‘non-binary’. And if you don’t have the words to describe yourself, how do you understand yourself?

And in the case of Lenny and Felicia, how do they navigate both the sexuality issues and those of non-monogamy?

Though the politics of the times they lived through are also dealt with. Early on, it’s suggested to Bernstein that he drops the ‘stein’ from his name in order to ‘get’ an orchestra.

The cinematography is superb, with filing in both black and white and colour, and in different proportions dependent on when the scenes are set. It’s a joy to look at and Cooper ensures that we get the time to linger – including on faces as they register emotion (which means subtle acting is required). This is not some cinematic equivalent of fast food.

The music is great – and not just Bernstein’s own. There’s Mahler and Beethoven too. And Broadway, since Bernstein transcended genres. Watch for the stunning On the Town rehearsal/fantasy sequence.

Cooper is simply superb as Bernstein, but Carey Mulligan steals it from under his feet. She is outstanding as Felicia – and must be a favourite for the Oscars. I couldn’t recommend it more.

 

Back to the concert hall – at last!

On Wednesday evening, after an all-too-long absence, The Other Half and I finally made it back to the concert hall for a socially-distanced programme at the Barbican.

It had been a long time coming: our last live concert was on 6 December 2019, also at the Barbican, for a recital by Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos, who performed a programme of works by Liszt and Robert Schumann.

 

By the end of that year, we’d been to five concerts/recitals (plus four operas together – one further one for me – and one play). Hopefully, this doesn’t make me sound like a dilletante in the culture vulture stakes.

 

Yet I had realised by late last autumn that while concerts were hardly an everyday experience for us, they were the form of entertainment outside the home that I missed most deeply. Perhaps there’s a sort of spiritual basis for that? Whatever.

 

On Friday 11 December last (my birthday, as it happens) I’d optimistically booked tickets for the Barbican on 10 January, for a recital by the wonderful young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. That went the way of all flesh only shortly thereafter, as London was plunged into tier three – and then the whole country into lockdown three.

 

As I said, the return has been a long time coming – and not least for all the musicians and backstage and front of house staff. The UK government, as with all bombastic, flag-shagging, populist regimes, seems determined to play down and denigrate the arts in general, irrespective of what they give to the country as a whole – even in terms of being a major attraction for tourism and, therefore, a big earner for the economy.

 

But hey ... if we had a half-way decent government in Westminster, it’s possible that we wouldn’t be where we are now.

 

Anyway, Wednesday was one of three socially distanced concerts at the Barbican being given by the London Symphony Orchestra, under conductor laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, and featuring Yuja Wang on piano.

 

The programme opened with the five very pleasant minutes of The Last Spring by Grieg, from his Two Elegiac Melodies, opus 34.

 

Then came Ms Wang to the stage for Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto – the Brief Encounter one.

 

After 35 minutes of that, we were served up Beethoven’s fifth symphony – synchronicity allowing that it takes the same time to perform.

 

It was a relatively short concert with no interval, but superbly chosen. Both of the main works are iconic – or at least, have iconic musical moments and phrases that possibly do the full works a disservice.

 

Personally, Rachmaninov’s first piano concerto is my favourite and I have rather dismissed the second because of the over-familiarity of its theme.

 

But here, it became new, the musical quotes back in context and not dominating the whole. Wang’s playing can be both muscular and exquisitely delicate. It was a glorious performance.

 

I teared up so often, but I remain slightly unsure as to whether that was the music itself, the performance and/or simply Being Back. Probably a full house. It had the feeling of a religious experience (and I do actually know what those are like!).

 

The Beethoven was a revelation for similar reasons to the Rachmaninov. Freed from being reduced to that brief, opening quote, the symphony becomes so much more. Not least, it can be viewed as a sort of struggle between the Classical and Romantic eras of western music that Beethoven bridged – and indeed, created the bridge between.

 

The first movement has a sense of the revolutionary – a hint of sturm und drang. The second then seems to leap back to a more courtly approach.

 

Only a week or so before, the OH and I had listened to a classic von Karajan recording of the sixth symphony, The Pastoral, on 180g vinyl. There, it is so easy to comprehend Beethoven, in effect, painting pictures in music. Here, you feel the struggle to reach that – and that is fascinating.

 

This week’s concert also made me consider my relationship with Mozart and why I don’t want to spend much time with his music. It’s as though Beethoven brought the emotion – and Mozart avoided it.

 

That’s a slightly simplistic view, of course – but not that much. My favourite piece of Mozart – and it’s one of my favourite pieces of music per se – is the requiem. But I think that’s because it has real emotional heft rather than simply being a bonbon for a not-very-intelligent emperor. 

 

The playing throughout was wonderful. Ms Wang is a superb pianist – I have ordered several of her recordings on the basis of what we saw and heard.

 

I’ve been shielding for much of that last year – and fortunate enough to have been able to work from home throughout. It’s not all been bad, but it’s not all been great either.

 

And getting back to hear music like this, played like this, was special almost beyond belief.

Musical pleasures for a classical Halloween

As we near Halloween – and indeed, All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, which are heavily linked to the Gaelic Samhain, with its Celtic pagan origins – there are plenty of lists and playlists around to get the 21^st century, US-influenced party going.

There are also lists of classical music suggestions for the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve.

 

In the latter category, there are obvious pieces that sprint to mind: Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain (1867) and Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897) top the list, both having been introduced to many people over the years by being used in Disney’s 1940 animated classic, Fantasia.

 

In terms of creep credentials, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (penned sometime between 1704 and 1750) takes some beating. Heard in an orchestrated version at the opening of Fantasia, with a silhouetted Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, it had made a horror impact years earlier.

Johann Sebastian was probably not intending to make audiences shiver, but the work had already been heard in the 1931 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the 1934 horror classic, The Black Cat – and it has been used many times since in suspense and horror contexts, including in the 1962 adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera.

Personally, of the more obvious pieces, I’d go for Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830) – and not just for the final movement, Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath (surely the template for a scratchy ‘witchy’ sound) – but also for the short fourth movement before it, March to the Scaffold.

And let us not forget a quick mention for Danse macabre, an 1874 tone poem from Saint-Saëns that has been used in many media – including in an adapted form as the theme tune to the BBC mystery crime series Jonathan Creek.

 

However, there are less obvious and less fantastical choices if you want something to tune into over the coming days, as the ‘thinning’ between this world and the next that is marked during Samhain, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day perhaps calls for a more contemplative approach.

 

Let’s start with Mahler’s Symphony No1 in D major (Titan), composed between late 1887 and early 1888. It is full of musical joys, but the one that concerns us most in this context comes in the third movement.

Here, the composer took the children’s song Bruder Jakob – Mahler knew it as Bruder Martin and it’s more widely known still as Frère Jacques – switched it into a minor key and made it part of a funeral march.

The effect is unnerving to say the least.

In non-Halloween terms, the fourth movement is fascinating in all sorts of way and, in places, seems to echo Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture while equally prefiguring John Williams’s marches for the Star Wars films.

 

Sticking with Mahler, the 1904 song cycle, Kindertotenleider (Songs on the Death of Children) is also worth spending time with. Based on a group of 428 poems written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833–34, after the death of two of his children, the composer set five of them to music.

Mahler himself was no stranger to such tragedy: eight of his own siblings had died in childhood and his second child, Maria, died at the age of four from scarlet fever.

He had carried on composing Kindertotenleider just shortly after the birth of Maria – something that horrified his wife Alma – and after the child’s death he wrote to a friend that “I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died”.

 

The work remains a haunting one of grief and loss.

 

If death is the one inevitability that we all share, then a much more recent work portrays it in a way that is every bit as haunting as Kindertotenleider.

 

Totentanz, by Thomas Adès, was composed for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and large orchestra, and was premiered in July 2013 as part of the Proms.

 

The music sets an anonymously authored text that appeared under a 15^th century frieze in the Marienkirche in Lübeck in northern Germany. This had shown “members of every category of human society, in strictly descending order of status, from the Pope to a baby. In between each human figure is an image of Death, dancing and inviting the humans to join him,” as Adès described it.

 

I missed that Prom, but coincidentally had been to Lübeck and visited the Marienkirche just a few months before that Proms premiere. I could hardly have been more excited when, earlier this year, just before lockdown, it was finally released on a new Deutsche Gramophon CD, Adès Conducts Adès (the disc also includes Gershwin expert Kirill Gerstein on piano for Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – a work strongly influenced by the great Gershwin).

 

Totentanz is a magnificent piece – amusing at the beginning in its sense of the powerful no longer having power in the face of mortality, but moving and genuinely sobering as it progresses toward its climax, where Death finally takes a baby.

 

The Totentanz mural in Lübeck was created in the confessional chapel in the Marienkirche in 1463 by Bernt Notke, a year before the plague reached the city from the south. It differs from similar artistic reminders of morality in that the background is recognisable as the spires of Lübeck. It was replaced by a copy in 1701 and destroyed by bombing in 1942 (see pre-war photo  of part of it at the top of this page).

 

Whether or not it is the perfect piece for contemplation in this time of a pandemic, I highly recommend Adès’s work.

 

Have a good weekend – and if you have any recommendations of your own, please share them here.

For the record – all hail vinyl

Today was going to involve a trip to the cinema to see Singin’ in the Rain on a big screen, but a chill I picked up when my lower legs and feet got soaked while working outside on Thursday put paid to going anywhere.

So instead, the day has offered another chance to indulge in a newfound household love of music – when it’s on vinyl rather than CD or digital.

Like the predicted demise of cinema as a result of TV, the death of records as a result of CDs and then the digital revolution has been greatly overdone.

Indeed, vinyl has been making a comeback for some years – particularly with DJs on the club scene: after all, how does scrubbing work when the music is on a CD or is digital?

There’s been a deck in wherever I’ve called my home – it’s been the one removable piece of one of those stacked hi-fi units. But it hasn’t been compatible with anything else we had for at least two decades. Some years ago, The Other Half bought a Bose amp and speakers that would link with our digital music, but it never worked with the aforementioned deck.

And yet …

Last month, the OH decided he was buying a new deck. The old one could be used in our study to digitise vinyl.

He went to Richer Sounds (a very ethically sound company, by the way) and came away with a very nice deck. But it didn’t quite work with the Bose kit. I suggested that, since he has a ‘big’ birthday coming up in January, I could get him a new amp and speakers as a pressie.

He didn’t want to wait that long – so I got it early. From Richer Sounds – which company I really do recommend. Ethically excellent and therefore, with superb, knowledgable staff. We’ll be back before the end of the year, because it looks increasingly likely that he’ll get a good CD player to add to the system, as a birthday present for me. I fully intend to take up the chance to test drive what they have with some of my favourite classical recording.

When we get that, we’ll use it to check just how much better vinyl is than CDs – or perhaps not. But for the moment, the evidence of our ears – and our souls – is overwhelming.

We’ve listened to easy, classical, rock, jazz, pop, folk-rock … and guess what? It’s all better. The sound is deeper, warmer and less … how to put it? Flat. You can easily imagine yourself in a concert space or a cathedral or in a recording studio – in other words, somewhere with space. For the first time, I see the shortcomings of CDs and digital.

Because for the first time, I’m listening to vinyl on really good kit, even if far from the top of any available range.

Growing up, my parents had one of those huge radiograms – the size of a big sofa, but probably lacking in the actual sound department. 

Back in the 1970s, the first really grown-up album I listened to was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, when babysitting and reading my employers’ copy of Emmanuelle as a much-needed sex education. Yet I’ve only ever owned it as a cassette and then a CD. A new, 180gm vinyl copy arrived yesterday: it’s like hearing it for the very first time.

Herbert Von Karajan

Last weekend, with a desperate, almost physical craving for something lushly late Romantic, I got hold of a new copy of Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Dance of the Seven Veils by Richard Strauss. Recorded in 1959 and 1960 respectively, by the Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert Von Karajan, these are iconic recordings.

We had listened to a recording I'd had since the 1980s of the Berlin Philharmonic, with Von Karajan conducting, playing Ravel’s Bolero and Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d’un faune. A revelation.

The Strauss was no different.

Hearing all these on vinyl, was extraordinary. I know them well – or so I thought – yet there I was, clocking things I’d never heard before.

It’s true: vinyl produces greater warmth, greater detail – and a greater sense of space: it’s not ‘flat’. You are suddenly in the concert hall or the cathedral (if listening to organ music or a requiem) or even the studio.

Earlier today, I put on my 7” of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (copy from the 1970s: eight-track and all that stuff). A work that I am almost unbelievably familiar with. And yes – it’s warmer and there is more detail – there’s a shimmer of bells at one point that I have never noticed before.

Then I followed it with an LP of James Galway playing Mozart’s flute concertos and, by god, if you don’t benefit from added detail with Wolfie, then where do you benefit from detail?

I have orders on the way for some minimalist American music (Glass, Adams and Reich) and for the new two-disc Jonas Kaufmann set of songs of Vienna, Wien. Apart from actually experiencing music live, I haven’t been as excited by it for years.

And what do we learn from all this? Certainly that, while tech and innovation can give us new things that are good, they are not inevitably better than what went before. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – and other such clichés.

Oh – and investing in seriously good hardware will produce seriously good results.

A Man of Good Hope that ultimately conveys hope

A Man of Good Hope, which has just finished a run at the Royal Opera House’s new Linbury Theatre is an extraordinary work: at once exhilarating and uplifting, yet also a deeply serious piece about violence, war, colonialism, racism and xenophobia.

Adapted by the Isango Ensemble from a 2015 book of the same name by Jonny Sternberg, it tells the true story of Asad Abdullahi.

In 1991, when civil war came to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, two-thirds of the city's population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad, after his mother was murdered by a militia, and with his father somewhere in hiding. He was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world.

Over the years, that migration takes Asad to South Africa, through refugee camps and into townships where xenophobia, hatred, resentment and violence reared their heads.

Somehow never losing his own humanity, Asad refused to give in: even when the odds seemed overwhelming, he continued to believe that, one day, he would be granted permission to go to settle in the global dreamland of the US of A.

Some reviews of A Man of Good Hope have suggested that it is a bit dodgy, since it’s an adaptation of a book by A White Man. Which rather misses the point that the Isango themselves are, y’know, black and African.

Indeed, if you want to compete in a competition for patronising white person of the year, you’d struggle to do it better than telling such a group that they’re ‘wrong’. Or that the premise of the US being a haven for refugees is ‘white saviour syndrome’. 

In the latter situation, the production makes absolutely sure you know, from very early on in the piece, that the belief in an America of no violence, no guns, wealth for all etc is a myth. When Asad and others continue to believe it, therefore, it is poignant because we know what a myth that is.

With a mini orchestra of eight marimbas, and a few upturned plastic bins, Isango has taken the story and turned it into an opera/musical: it’s not just national boundaries that are crossed here, but musical ones too, with styles from European classical to a wide variety of African styles.

It’s a serious, thought-provoking piece, yet somehow doesn’t leave one feeling depressed.

Siphosethus Hintsho (pictured above, bottom right) as the child Asad, rather steals the show – this is an exceptionally talented youngster – but Isango is an ensemble and there are no weak spots anywhere on stage. They all act, they all dance, they all sing, they all play instruments. And they all do it very, very well.

It’s difficult not to feel a Brechtian influence, but this is not westernised Africa: this is an African story – and a global one. And yes, given history, it is a predominantly South African way, with western influences. But ultimately, with an unmistakably authentic African voice.

Essential food for the soul from the Belcea Quartet

In a world apparently going – if not having already gone – completely mad, food for the soul is essential to keep one going, and the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank provided the setting for just that on Tuesday evening.

The Belcea Quartet opened with Haydn’s String Quartet in G, Op33 No5. Sometimes nicknamed How do you do? for the curtseying, four-note opening phrase at the beginning and end of the first movement, it’s a light piece with a sense of wit.

In other words, it's somewhat unexpected if what you're expecting is the polite formality of early Classical chamber music.

But written in 1781, it was one of a series of pieces that Haydn advertised to potential subscribers as being very new. And in breaking that polite formality, they were.

My knowledge of chamber music from the Classical periodc is far, far from being encyclopedic – and certainly not when it comes to the man known as the ‘Father of the Symphony’ and the ‘Father of String Quartet’ – but this was toe-tapping stuff.

Indeed, I've arguably avoided Haydn over the years because I find him so formal. It's equally no coincidence that my favourite Classical composer is Beethoven, who heralded in the Romantic era.

The quartet’s repertoire doesn’t often include Haydn: Krzyysztof Chorzelski, the viola player – who had run astonishingly run the London Marathon a couple of days previously for a pancreatic cancer research charity – has said that this is partly because Haydn’s music was never intended for public performance in large concert venues.

With this work, they apparently feel more liberated – and, indeed, it was a wonderful performance, free yet controlled.

Next up was Janáček’s String Quartet No2. This is known as ‘Intimate Letters,’ because of the composer’s passion for Kamila Stösslová, who he met and became besotted with in 1917. The quartet, written in 1928 (the year of his death), enshrines the sentiments of the hundreds of ardent letters and messages he sent her.

Overflowing with a sense of passion, with Romantic passages and the clear influences of folk music, it’s a wondrous piece – light years away from any concept of chamber music as essentially stuffy.

I know very little about Janáček’s music: this made me want to know a lot more.

After the interval, the Belcea were joined on stage by pianist Piotr Anderszewski for Shostakovich’s Quintet in G minor for piano & strings, Op57.

The nods back to Beethoven are clear in the first movement, but elsewhere it is impish, sometimes dark and sometimes light.

I wasn’t familiar any of the works before hearing them live – but what a programme.

The big question is whether to watch the musicians closely or to close your eyes and let the music itself take centre stage. I moved between the two, but the latter has definite advantages: it’s as though the music itself takes on a whole new dimension.

The Belcea are all exceptionally fine musicians: founder and violinist Corina Belcea stands out, as does Antoine Lederlin on the cello. But when the music gives them the opportunity, Chorzelski and Axel Schacher on violin show just how much they can shine too. Anderszewski, too, is a musician of very high calibre.

When you get the chance to hear musicians like this live, the results can be utterly uplifting. Thank goodness that The Other Half had spotted that this concert was on – it was brilliant.

The only surprise was that the hall was barely half full. The audience that was there, however, more than made up for numbers in its appreciation.

Rattle on fire, even if you can't hum Bruckner

British concertgoers had the chance, earlier this week, to bid farewell to the partnership between the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and it’s conductor since 1999, Sir Simon Rattle.

Two concerts at the Southbank Centre over two nights offered the hallmarks of Rattle’s tenure in the German capital – programmes combining classic works and new ones. The Other Half and I were fortunate enough to have been able to book decently-priced tickets just a few days earlier, having struggled to find anything that seemed affordable some months earlier.

The first concert saw the UK premiere of Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, followed by Bruckner’s ninth symphony.

The former was really short, but fascinating. The composer was influenced by Steve Reich in particular, and it certainly reflects such minimalism, while also involving incredibly complex rhythms – particularly in the third piece.

Understated in so many ways, it was a fascinating piece – and one that will make me look up the composer.

Bruckner’s ninth is … well, it was unfinished and it is big (arguably overlong) and is loud. Those were my impressions last year when we saw/heard Bernard Haitink conduct the LSO at the Barbican in the same work. Context: oddly (or perhaps not) that was just after my mother’s funeral. This concert came as I am arranging my father’s funeral. Which will doubtless ensure that it sticks in my mind in terms of this music.

Last year was a performance that seemed merely loud. This had far, far more nuance – though it’s still overlong as piece. I am not knowledgable about relative acoustics, so I cannot know whether those of the Royal Festival Hall or the Barbican are better.

But one thing was clear, though – the orchestra’s sound.

On both the contemporary and the Romantic, the Berlin’s sound was simply superb. British orchestras have historically been let down by the string playing, but have improved greatly in recent years. Yet when you hear a band like this, you experience something that is a step into something special. And shimmering strings are an enormously important way to judge an orchestra.

Rattle’s German years come with mixed results – his recording with the Berlin of Orff’s Carmina Burana is pretty dreadful – but he is happy to experiment with new music and with the interpretation of less-new music.

Classical music should not be an ant encased in amber – it needs the likes of Rattle to make it live in the here and now, so personally, I’m ready to deal with the negative results of that.

This Bruckner gave me a sense of the piece being worth the effort. It was also a good moment to remember that Rattle had, as a precondition of his appointment, ensured that all the musicians got a wage rise after years of declining pay; that he took the band into schools and that he gurned it into a foundation, to remove it from all political control.

Rattle might not be a Karajan (who could be?), but his legacy in Berlin will be a very long and important one. The English in particular might have a suspicion of anything intellectual/high cultural, but Rattle is someone we should celebrate and hopefully, his tenure at the LSO will help further boost classical music on this side of the Channel.

Cello joy as Soltani's debut hits the shelves

Home

Kian Soltani and Aaron Pilsan

Deutsche Grammophon

You know what it’s like: you wait ages for a brilliant cello album to come your way and then suddenly there’s a queue.

The 2012 BBC Young Musician winner, Laura van der Heijden, released her first album in the last days of 2017 (I’ll be looking at this another time), while the recording debut of the 2016 champion, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, arrived at the start of this month.

And now we have Home, the debut of Kian Soltani, the winner of the 2013 International Paulo Cello Competition.

The idea behind Home is to weave together Kian’s roots. Born and brought up in Austria, of Iranian parents, the programme reflects this.

We open with Arpeggione, one of the most famous pieces by Schubert, a composer for whom the cellist has a particular fondness, and a work demanding virtuosity.

After the three movements of that, Schubert’s Nacht und Träume concludes the Classical section of this album, before we head into the Romantic era and Schumann – another Austrian composer with whom Soltani feels a particular affinity.

Schumman originally wrote Zart und mit Ausdruck, Lebhaft, leicht and Rasch und mit Feuer as a three-movement work, Fantasy Pieces for Clarinet and Piano – while also stipulating that cello or violin could replace the former.

More Schumann follows, before we move into a new work.

Seven Persian Folk Songs comprises seven pieces, ranging from the poetic to the ferocious. Written by Iranian composer Reza Vali for Soltani and dedicated it to him, it provides a fascinating contrast to the first parts of the album.

Some critics reject Persian symphonic music – also known as Persian polyphonic music and generally written by Persian/Iranian composers for Western ensembles and orchestras – because of the differences between Persian and Western scales.

However, composers have found ways to solve the questions these differences ask and Vali’s ability to do this is part of why the resulting work is so fascinating in its melding of different musical cultures, which leaves us with both familiarity and yet something different and challenging.

The album concludes with Iranian Fire Dance, a composition by the cellist himself.

In effect, the Persian/Iranian works add a philosophical complexity to the album as a whole, since in combining the traditional with the new, they add a wider sense of ‘home’ that’s more in keeping with the philosophical complexity of the German concept  of‘Heimat’ than any straightforward understanding of the word.

It adds a musical note too to current debates around migration, integration and cultural fusion.

Kian is a protegée of Anne-Sophie Mutter and Daniel Barenboim – he has been a member of the former’s Virtuosi as well as a member of the latter’s West-Eastern-Divan-Orchestra and is also a member of the newly-founded Boulez-Ensemble.

The Schubert here is exquisite, with a lightness that almost defies belief. The Schumann takes us into more melancholy, contemplative terrain, while the Vali ensures we don’t lapse into easy listening mode.

Throughout, Soltani’s playing is simply superb, with tremendous range of tone and emotion. And enjoying equal billing is pianist Aaron Pilsan, whose playing is every bit a match for his compatriot.

Quite simply, this is a wonderful release that reinforces the variety and beauty of the cello – and also  adds to a growing sense of how blessed we are in seeing such a number of superb young musicians rising up in front of us.