Hugh Canning
The Sunday Times
February 2016

Britain’s leading cellist mines a vein of melancholy in both Elgar and Walton’s cello concertos, each written towards the end of each man’s creative life (1919 and 1956), and neither much liked by critics when they first appeared. Isserlis’s playing of the solo part in the Elgar evokes an elegy for a lost world, while he captures perfectly the bittersweet languor of the Walton. Substantial additions here are Gustav Holst’s 1911 Invocation, with orchestra, and his daughter Imogen’s haunting solo piece The Fall of the Leaf.