This album is very important to me on many levels: passionate about the cello, music, collaborating and sharing, this album represents everything that I love.
“Song” and “singing” are at the very heart of what I feel is the most important element connecting all performers to their audiences and listeners. The singing quality within each of our individual sounds is key to communicating, and it is something I focus on in my own playing since sound is the most powerful tool we have as performers. The cello and horn are often considered to be as close to the human voice as almost any other instrument, therefore this combination is a natural partnership.
As well as carefully selecting a handful of songs which have been arranged by Scholar Professor Timothy Jones for both cello, horn and piano and cello and piano, I wanted to mirror this idea and take the slow movement from one of Schubert’s most iconic works (thought to be the last chamber piece he wrote) the great C major string quintet known as the “‘Cello Quintet”, scored for string quartet plus an extra cello, and perform this with cello and the acclaimed all-male British vocal consort, The Gesualdo Six. It is a work I have played numerous times and this magnificent slow movement was something I kept hearing “sung”: the timelessly sustained opening as if bowed, with the dotted calling motif now played on the cello. In Simon Parkin’s beautiful, reimagined version, he takes inspiration from the Heinrich Heine poem “Wo wird einst”. Just as the C major Quintet is a momentous work for string players, “Die Nacht” is one of Schubert’s most famous songs, so to be part of this vocal group’s exquisite sonority was extremely special.
I have also included the “Arpeggione” Sonata on this disc (originally written for a six stringed instrument called the ‘Arpeggione’) as it is such an important core repertoire piece for cellists, and one which demonstrates the full range and beauty that can be achieved on the cello. My ultimate wish for this album is that the listener should become unaware as to whether they are hearing singers or instrumentalists as both amalgamate, allowing the beauty of the music of Schubert, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, to transport us and connect us through the power of music itself.

Josephine Knight

In 1827, the year of Beethoven’s death, the German writer Heinrich Heine published a new volume of poetry he called Buch der Lieder. How could a book of printed texts count as Lieder – as songs? The answer lies in the lyrical quality of Heine’s verse, and the contemporary obsession with the idea of folksong – the seamless blending of text and tune, heartfelt emotion and simplicity, that allowed for an intimate personal engagement between speakers, singers and listeners. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, as towns and cities grew ever bigger and more technologically complex, the idealistic beauty of these songs made them hugely popular among the urban middle and upper classes.
Just as poems could be songs, so too could instrumentalists ‘sing’. Attempting to achieve a passable imitation of the human singing voice was often stated as the goal of instrumental pedagogues; and since concerts were a scarce and expensive commodity, it was common practice to perform music at home in arrangements to suit the assembled company. String quartets might become piano duets; songs and choral pieces may be transformed into ensembles for flutes, violins, viola and cello or vice versa. And composers were pragmatic enough to know that their works had meaning and value in arrangements as well as in ‘authentic’ versions as first conceived.
Which is why it seems quite likely that Franz Schubert would have wholly recognised the impulse to perform his music in arrangements, as we hear a number on this disc. The programme unites a practical ‘arrangement’ by Schubert himself with a series of brand-new arrangements by Simon Parkin and Timothy Jones (scholar and editor, who shares his name with the horn soloist in this project!), specially commissioned by cellist Josephine Knight. It is the perfect opportunity, as Knight explains, to hear these familiar pieces anew through musical reimagining: her vision of ‘singing’ Schubert finally realised.
Jones’s rendering of three songs from Winterreise and one of Schwanengesang for horn, cello and piano skilfully adapt not only the sung melodies, but also certain details and gestures of the piano accompaniment for instrumental emphasis. We hear the fluttering leaves of ‘Der Lindenbaum’ and the fanfare of the post-horn in ‘Die Post’ – moments of optimism and happy memories to the wandering protagonist of Winterreise, in each case dashed by the realisation that this heartbroken young man can expect no more contact with the woman who has forsaken him. The deathly tempting stillness of ‘Das Wirtshaus’ – not a true inn, but a graveyard, the poem tells us – is particularly affecting in the mellow tenor registers of horn and cello. The poet of Winterreise, Wilhelm Müller, was a great inspiration to Heinrich Heine; and it is Heine’s spine-chilling ‘Der Doppelgänger’ that completes this group. Here, the cello adopts Schubert’s vocal line directly. It is a particularly compelling example of the power of this instrument to ‘speak’, as we hear the wordless narration of a man observing his own shadow watching the house of a long-departed lover.
These songs all date from the final years of Schubert’s life: Winterreise was completed in late 1827, and ‘Der Doppelgänger’ (taken from Heine’s newly published Buch der Lieder) was printed a few months after Schubert’s death in November 1828. The so-called ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata is several years earlier, written as a showpiece for a new hybrid instrument. The Viennese instrument builder Johann Georg Staufer invented the arpeggione – a six-stringed bowed guitar with frets – in the spring of 1823, and both Staufer himself and Vincenz Schuster (the instrument’s chief performer) made themselves known to Schubert later that year with the aim of commissioning a showpiece from him. Unfortunately, the bright and glorious future of the arpeggione as imagined by Staufer and Schuster never came to pass, and the work that Schubert composed was not published until 1871, when it was issued with a joint designation of ‘für Arpeggione oder Violoncello’. Signs of the unusual instrument’s demise are clearly apparent in this printed score, which contained an explanation of what an arpeggione was and how it worked – which seems particularly ironic since the name ‘arpeggione’ was only broadly applied to the instrument because of Schubert’s sonata.
The nature of the Arpeggione Sonata suggests that Schubert himself was quite aware of just how unlikely it was that the instrument would become a household name: although he does make the occasional nod to its unique abilities of playing chords and extensive arpeggios, the material is almost all perfectly playable on a standard cello. This canny writing on Schubert’s part has enabled cellists to enjoy performing the solo sonata by a composer who wrote no other such repertoire for the instrument.
The male-voice partsong Die Nacht was probably written in 1822, the year before Staufer invented his arpeggione, and was one of four pieces for two tenors and two basses that were published the following year for this increasingly popular ensemble grouping. Simon Parkin’s arrangement drapes a sinuous cello line around Schubert’s part-writing, beautifully capturing the ‘heavenly calm’ of Friedrich Krummacher’s poem.
The most striking arrangement on this disc is the first piece we hear. Knight commissioned Parkin to add not strings to a vocal piece, but voices to one of Schubert’s most famous string compositions. The String Quintet in C major was written in the autumn of 1828, just a few month before the composer’s death in November at the age of 31. It is ideally suited for its players (two violinists, one violist, two cellists)… but here we hear it reimagined for two countertenors, two tenors, baritone, bass and cello. That Schubert was a song-writer par excellence is not in question – but in Parkin’s arrangement, the songfulness of the Quintet’s slow movement is immediately writ large, the cello pulsing below as the voices unfold a setting of Heine’s Wo?: ‘Wo wird einst des Wandermüden’ (‘Where shall the weary traveller / Find his final resting place?’). That it is possible to maintain this sense of both lyricism and clear articulation in the restless middle section is a testament to the quality of our singers, who lead us through thickets of brooding minor-key harmonies and onwards to the limpid stillness of the closing few minutes of the movement.

© Katy Hamilton