Cuban bassist, composer, and bandleader Israel "Cachao" Lopez embodies the history of modern Cuban music. In the late 1930s, he and his brother Orestes, a pianist and composer, reworked the old danzon and created the revolutionary mambo. By the time the world was catching up to it, 20 years later, he was on to another innovation, leading descargas, Latin jam sessions. He has anchored nearly every significant group in Latin music in the U.S. over the past 35 years, from Machito to Gloria Estefan. Master Sessions, released in 1994 and featuring a superb cast including reedman Paquito D'Rivera, percussionist Francisco Aguabella, flutist Nestor Torres, and timbalero Orestes Vilato, represented Cachao's long overdue rediscovery. The program includes danzones, decargas, rumbas, and even an Ernesto Lecuona piece. The music here is as down-home wise and deceptively simple as the man at the bottom of it. Musical lessons are rarely as rich and delightful. —Fernando Gonzalez

Steven Isserlis is a splendid cellist with a consummate technique and a focused, intense tone capable of infinite variety. He's an enterprising, imaginative musician with a penchant for centering programs on a single composer or national idiom. He has recorded French sonatas for Virgin Classics, and for RCA, the works of Mendelssohn, John Taverner, Haydn, and Czech and Russian composers.

On his latest CD, Isserlis performs four relatively unfamiliar compositions of Saint-Saëns. Unfortunately, obscure works by a good composer are usually neglected for a reason. Indeed, the Second Concerto, Op. 119, and Second Sonata, Op. 123, presented here are inferior to their earlier counterparts in structural cohesion and melodic inspiration, though the Sonata contains an arresting, unusual Scherzo in the form of variations and a devout, dramatic slow movement. There are also two shorter pieces: Romance Op. 67, an appealingly melodious, slow, dreamy, subdued piece, and "La Muse et le Poète," Op. 132, for solo violin and cello with orchestra. An extended tone-poem, almost impressionist in its colorful orchestration, "La Muse" is mostly a rhapsodic dialogue between the two soloists, who unite only in a few climactic moments. Both parts are extremely difficult and continually ascend into the highest register.

Isserlis has chosen his partners wisely. Joshua Bell's brilliant virtuosity and radiant, soaring tone give the music a rapturous, ecstatic expressiveness. In the Sonata, pianist Pascal Devoyon, a specialist in French music who also partners with Isserlis on the French recording, is a marvelous collaborator. Isserlis plays with a combination of austere nobility and romantic ardor that bring out the music's strengths and conceal its weaknesses. —Edith Eisler

No Description Available.
Genre: Spoken Word: Comedy
Media Format: Compact Disk
Rating:
Release Date: 11-JUL-2006