Boccherini’s cello concertos, some twelve in number, were written comparatively early in his career, all dating from the years during which he toured as a virtuoso. And by the way: what a virtuoso! Presuming that he could play his own music—which I think is a fair presumption—he must have been a truly wonderful player; one can feel it in the writing, as challenging as anything composed for the cello before the twentieth century, at least. (The great Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, an avid Boccheriniphile, considered Boccherini to have been, on the evidence of his music, the greatest cellist of all time.) The concerto in D, G479, one of a set of four concertos published in Paris in 1770, displays this virtuosity to a remarkable extent. (Boccherini’s works, grouped by genre rather than arranged chronologically, were catalogued in the late 1960s by the great French musicologist Yves Gérard—hence the G numbers.) More than any other work on this album, it gives us, from the soloist’s first notes, a clear idea of Boccherini the concert performer: the cello enters at a strikingly high register, almost violin-like, with a bold theme that combines a singing quality with filigree ornamentation; much of the writing in this movement requires the soloist to dance nimbly at the top of the instrument. In contrast, however, Boccherini then gives us a slow movement that is in all but words an operatic aria for the cello; the resulting pathos is firmly—if never rudely—broken by horn calls (on violins), announcing a finale of refined brilliance.

One can imagine that this concerto, at least from the soloist’s entry, must have provided a wholly new musical experience for Boccherini’s audiences—not least through the extraordinary orchestration of the solo passages, in which the cello is accompanied by violins only (presumably intended for one player per part, as performed here). This ultra-light scoring is a feature of many of the concertos. Perhaps it was purely for practical reasons: it’s possible that Boccherini was, at least on occasion, the only cellist in the group performing the concertos; in that case he would have been unable, of course, to provide the bass line at the same time as playing the solo part. This would have left him faced with a dilemma. The double bass would probably have sounded too low to provide a satisfying foundation for the harmony—and perhaps Boccherini didn’t trust his violist’s intonation! At any rate, the resulting effect, with the cello often inhabiting the same stratosphere as the violins, is remarkably translucent and ethereal—truly ‘music of the angels’.

from notes by Steven Isserlis © 2024