I am very happy to announce the release of my new recital disc featuring British composers Britten, Bridge and Bax.

I have been in love with these pieces for years, especially the Britten sonata has been on my recital programs dozens of times, so it seemed only logical to finally record it. We paired it with Bridge, who was Brittens teacher and a wonderful composer, together with the wonderfully eloquent Bax Legend Sonata. I really hope you like it!

To order the CD, please click here.

Please click here to check out this piece by David Mermelstein in the L.A. Times on the Sounding Off Tour and some of my other activity

I had a very exciting week at the Concertgebouw orchestra with their music director Mariss Jansons and the first cello concerto by Shostakovitsh – for me a truly  unforgettable experience! Please check out this video with a short interview and some footage from the rehearsals:

Mariss Jansons is regarded as one of the greatest conductors of our time, and I felt incredibly honored to be working with him. I was fascinated that until the very last moment he wanted to discuss details of the concerto and was keen on constantly improving our interpretation. What an intense process! Here we are discussing something on stage during the first rehearsal with the orchestra:

Conductor Jahja Ling, cellist Johannes Moser lead Cleveland Orchestra’s weekend feast at Blossom Music Center
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Zachary Lewis
Plain Dealer Music Critic

In some places, back-to-back nights of weighty symphonic music, such as those presented last weekend by the Cleveland Orchestra, can seem protracted. Not so at Blossom Music Center.

Between a slew of estimable artists, including four conductors, two guest soloists and a local student chamber orchestra, a well-stocked musical feast came and went in a flash.

Most engrossing was cellist Johannes Moser’s tour-de-force account Sunday of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Throughout, his mission seemed to be to squeeze out every bit of musical pulp, to give listeners heart palpitations with a score that’s thrilling enough on its own.

Where the music asks for intensity, Moser answered with ferocity, wailing on his cello like a rock guitarist. The finale, especially, was a raging tide. But quieter passages were also gripping, as eerie high notes evoked utter loneliness or resignation.

Moser wasn’t out there alone. Conductor Jahja Ling, celebrating a 25-year affiliation with the orchestra, responded to the cellist in kind, and soloists on horn, oboe and clarinet injected sirenlike urgency.

(…)

To read the full review, click here

Please check out this little video I made of my first meeting with Phyllis Chen – as you can see we had a lot of fun! If you want to learn more about Phyllis, please click here

Please check out this interview I did for WQXR in New York with the fabulous Jeff Spurgeon!

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Please listen to my interview on WNYC with the great John Schaefer!

Review: Herbert Blomstedt guest conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic
3:57 PM, March 29, 2009
Baroque music without theories: What blessed relief. That’s what guest
conductor Herbert Blomstedt and the Los Angeles Philharmonic served up
Friday at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

In the bad old days, music was music, period, no matter when it was
written and what the details of its original performance might have
been. Then the specialists moved in, illuminating the field, to be sure,
but also dividing it into do’s and don’ts, which soon became Thou
shalt’s and Thou shalt not’s.

Blomstedt and crew said the heck with that. Handel’s “Music for the
Royal Fireworks” is simply grand and glorious, so let’s play it with
sumptuous sound on modern instruments, without tripping over issues of
gut versus steel strings, or clipped versus legato phrasing, or whether
to use vibrato, or how many musicians should be involved.

The trick, of course, is still to maintain transparency, balance,
proportion and, especially, a lively engagement with the inner life of
the music. All this, Blomstedt, who is a genial, undemonstrative but
resourceful presence on the podium, had in full measure.

In the peppy, more martial movements, the playing was regal without
being pompous. In the paean to peace in the third section, the
performance was airy and gracious. Throughout, the lines emerged clearly
and cleanly layered, with Handel’s changes in instrumentation carefully
and delightfully revealed. Blomstedt showed a masterly sense of dynamic
proportion appropriate to the hall.

But even better was his use of the Disney acoustic for Haydn’s Cello
Concerto in C, with the remarkable Johannes Moser as the soloist. Here,
with the orchestra reduced to about 20 players, the danger lay in
pianissimo preciousness. Instead, there emerged jewel-like,
collaborative playing that was exquisitely balanced and detailed.

Moser deserves special credit for keeping his formidable technique in
the service of the music and the conception of the performance. He never
grandstanded against his colleagues, although he did take rightful pride
of place, interacting and challenging them, his fingers flying, his body
lurching forward with a witty accent or two. For their part, the
musicians never flinched, faltered or overstepped their bounds.

At times like this, it was clear that such music survives for reasons
beyond its attractive tunefulness and solid construction. It reveals and
engages us in not only a musical, but a social and philosophical ideal.

After intermission, Blomstedt led the orchestra in Mendelssohn’s
“Scottish” Symphony. All the previous virtues emerged intact, although
on a larger scale. Climaxes were forceful, but not catastrophic. Quiet
passages were intimate without vanishing. In the fast second movement,
the winds were splendid; the strings, elfin and precise. The brass made
a rich, luxurious sound.

Blomstedt is no slouch in this or any other later repertory, but he
merits particular gratitude for giving us the opportunity to savor
Handel again with the qualities the Los Angeles Philharmonic can bring
to the music.

–Chris Pasles

Los Angeles Times
March 29, 2009a

Please check out this review of my Seattle recital – one piece was performed using my electric setup.

Britten, Brahms, and Moser: Johannes Moser, cello and electric cello; Oksana Ezhokina, piano; Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle  1.2.2009 (BJ)

The opening work on this fascinating program, the sonata that Britten wrote for Rostropovich, was not merely performed–we were treated instead to what was essentially a lecture-recital. With a wonderful combination of seriousness, humor, and charm, the young German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser took the work to pieces, elucidating its structure and meaning with salutary clarity, and then put it together again, collaborating with the excellent Oksana Ezhokina in a performance that was masterly in every respect–and that many in the audience must surely have enjoyed much more than they might have done without the introduction.

Moser has everything a cellist needs in the way of both technical and artistic equipment. His two-handed pizzicatos in the second movement of the sonata offered only one example on the technical side–tone and intonation were also beyond cavil–and his expressive gift served the music with no less comprehensive understanding. At the other end of the program, Brahms’s Cello Sonata No. 1 received equally compelling advocacy. I was particularly impressed by the subtlety of the performers’ handling of tempo modification: they responded eloquently to the shifting expressive demands of the music, but without any crude signposting, so that I became aware that tempo had changed, without being able to put my figure on the exact moment when the change had happened.

My only regret about this passionate performance was that the piano lid was on the short stick. Much more so than with Britten’s spare keyboard textures, Brahms’s rich piano part needed the lid to be higher if Ms. Ezhokina’s playing was to achieve equal impact with Moser’s amply sonorous tone; Brahms, after all, was still writing what he called sonatas “for piano and cello,” and though no one would deny the cello’s lead role in many passages, a more even balance of power would have been beneficial.

Brahms was one of Britten’s unfavorite composers, so it was probably politic to separate their works by the interpolation of other music. As it happened, this was scarcely less enjoyable. Again, Moser’s lucid explanation helped no end in making his roughly 15-minute excursion on the electric cello approachable, but the sounds he (and the computer, and the hall’s loudspeaker system) made were in any case mightily attractive.

Electronic music has gone through a myriad of widely varying manifestations. Aside from the rare masterpiece, such as Maderna’s 1958 composition Continuo, it may be felt that “pure” electronic music’s impact on even the most open-minded listener has been fairly negligible. Around 1960, performers began to experiment in combining live performance with the simultaneous electronic modification of their playing. I remember attending a number of such performances in New York’s Town Hall in the early ’60s. But the musicians who gave them, enterprising though they were, lacked the sheer musical gifts to make the results any more than moderately interesting.

Johannes Moser is in a different class entirely. The delicacy of his ear and the power of his imagination match his technical fluency. There were one or two moments when he did with the music just what I thought he was going to do, but many more that were unpredictable, yet that at the same time, once heard, seemed inevitable. And the magical atmosphere that his composition/performance created went far beyond any such prosaic quality as “interesting.”

Bernard Jacobson