Not the soloist, watch the cello

Not the soloist, watch the cello

Orchestras

norman lebrecht

August 09, 2024

Watch this from the current Verbier season.

She’s Swiss, 19 years old, from Lausanne.

Comments

  • Rafael Enrique Irizarry says:

    Extraordinarily gifted cellist. World-class to my ears. [Having heard Rose, Yo Yo Ma, Harrell, Starker, Ginastera and several others live, and up-close, I can perhaps form a creditable opinion.] Hopefully she will enter the ranks of the exceptional in the not-too-distant future. Will she pursue an orchestral career? She is section-principal material in just about any ensemble in the world. All the best to her! Watch her, Mr. Lebrecht. This is no scantily clad megalomaniac.

  • fierywoman says:

    Does this lovely cellist have a name?

  • Peter says:

    Stunningly beautiful phrasing.

  • professional musician says:

    Simply wonderful!!! What a gifted young musician!

  • Ken Lee says:

    Beautiful playing. So controlled too.

  • Christian Thompson says:

    Nice Norman…..
    I was there presenting for Medici. And Clara was a miracle…..
    I interviewed her a few days later too.

  • Lola Viola says:

    Like hearing God

  • nimitta says:

    Magical! Clara Schlotz has such a feel for this part…and the piano soloist Alexandre Kantorow is superb in Brahms as well.

  • Observing2 says:

    Hmmm….I find her tone rather thin and lacklustre. It needs the warm bodied, lush, Brahmsian tone, that painful yearning singing quality that’s found in Du Pre, Rostropovich and Yo Yo Ma.

  • Margaret Koscielny says:

    It’s playing such as that, combined with Brahm’s pathos in this piece, which has always made listening to Brahms a private affair via recordings. The tears he evokes are too embarrassing to share in public.

    Beautiful! Lovely talent.

  • Sanda Schuldmann says:

    I wonder if any of today’s young conductors ever listen to the old masters like Celibidache, for example? They and we would benefit from it a great deal.

    • professional musician says:

      If they want to play it at half speed, yes.

    • John Martin says:

      He had a fine musical mind as broadcasts and kater recordings show. And tooHe also had a bitter nasty attitude and it kept him from leading some of the better orchestras which many think he deserved. Was he different just to be different ir did he have integrity?

      • professional musician says:

        The biggest prick i ever played under….Creating a ridiculuous cult by playing everything at half speed, a nauseating , pompous clown ,totally full of himself,full of contempt, disrespect, racism, misogynism, arrogance…The great Maurice Murphy told me some funny stories how LSO members gave him a little lesson…I played once under him, in a youth orchestra.Called in sick for the second program.At least i didn´t have to practice too hard, since everything was at practice speed….I got free tickets for his Berlin Phil return, i believe it was in 1992…He managed to get the brass and strings at the end of the first mvt of Bruckner 7 half a bar apart, at both concerts!!!( It was on the original broadcast, but got edited for VHS and Digital Concert Hall….That´s quite an achievement, with the Berlin Phil!!!

  • Alan says:

    Name? Is this a youth orchestra? The oboist is good too!

  • No Username says:

    Great, let‘s objectify more 19-year-old women by referring to them without their name… that‘s a good look for this site. Unless, of course, it is the cello who is Swiss and 19 years old…?

  • Annabelle Weidenfeld says:

    Her name is Clara Schlotz and I think you will all remember the very first time you heard her, in years to come!

  • John Martin says:

    What a spacious and really ideal tempo. Only one other performance have I heard the hello’s solo and duet played so memorable and really giving us an essential august Brahms quality: a cellist in a Frederic-Francois Guy performance. The winds in the middle here too. I recently heard a laterKarajan recording with a pianist who I never hear talked about:Werner Richter-Hauser one of the best accounts of this music!

    • microview says:

      Absolutely. Strange that Karajan’s DG version with Anda didn’t reach the same level, in spite of their close relationship.

    • David K. Nelson says:

      The pianist you are thinking of is Hans Richter-Haaser.

      Although it is sometimes conjectured that Brahms got the wonderful idea for the cello solo in the slow movement from Clara Schumann’s own piano concerto, I’ve always suspected that another and stronger influence was the cello solo in the slow movement of Robert Schumann’s violin concerto a work which Clara, in consultation with Brahms and Joachim, decided to suppress as reflecting his final insanity and thus potentially damaging to Robert’s still developing reputation. But that theme continued to intrigue Schumann for the rest of his days (claiming he had received it from the spirits of Mendelssohn and Schubert) and Brahms also did his best to preserve and perpetuate the theme as something like the last flicker of Robert Schumann’s true genius.

      Those two cello solos could almost be played as a duet with the piano concerto’s cello solo being the accompaniment.

  • Paul Carlile says:

    Wonderful, moved me to tears; perfect tempo, phrasing, tone….
    My Mother loved Brahms, her father was a cellist, we chose this movement as the entry to her funeral ceremony (and the sparkling 4th movement for the exit!!), i wish she (and my Grandfather), could have heard this artist.
    Thank you so much.

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