CARL FRIEDRICH ABEL: Cello Concerto in C Major; CHRISTIAN ERNST GRAF: Sinfonia I; Concerto for Cello No. 2 in D Major; Sinfonia III; Cello Concerto No. 1 in D Major – Klaus-Dieter Brandt, cello / L’arpa festante – Ars Produktion

CARL FRIEDRICH ABEL: Cello Concerto in C Major; CHRISTIAN ERNST GRAF: Sinfonia I; Concerto for Cello No. 2 in D Major; Sinfonia III; Cello Concerto No. 1 in D Major – Klaus-Dieter Brandt, cello / L’arpa festante – Ars Produktion multichannel SACD ARS 38 068, 74:40 [Distr. by Naxos] ****1/2:
While you can readily sample Carl F. Abel’s symphonies and chamber music via recordings, it’s unlikely you’ll hear his music in concert anytime soon. Mostly his name is remembered in connection with the London Bach, Johann Christian; together, they founded the Bach-Abel Concerts, the first series of professional subscription concerts in England. A virtuoso gamba and cello player, Abel was also something of a bon vivant, and it’s thought that he drank himself into an early grave.
What I’ve heard of his music is unfailingly elegant, which certainly sums up his Cello Concerto in C Major. It reminds me of another, equally elegant concerto in C major, the first of Haydn’s two for cello. Both C-major concertos have a majestic, slowish first movement, a stately middle movement. Haydn’s lightning-quick finale is more virtuosic, and the whole piece sticks in the mind better, but Abel’s concerto is really something of a find. It has special felicities, such as the attractive parts for the horns in the slow movement and the finale, where they imitate hunting calls; there must have been fine hornists in the orchestra Abel wrote for. As you’d expect from a cellist, the writing for the cello is especially fine and idiomatic. There’s the usual showy passagework and double-stop fireworks together with opportunities for the cello to sing sweetly.
With the works of Christian Graf (1723-1804), we move away from Rococo elegance to a hearty Classicism. Graf’s is an even more obscure name than Abel’s, so it’s especially good to have the sampling of his works offered on this CD. Graf worked in his native Germany, at his hometown of Rudolstadt and Arnhem, before rising to the position of maître de chapelle at the court of Orange-Nassau in The Hague, retiring in 1790. Among the works he wrote while at The Hague were five cello concertos published in 1771 and no fewer than eighty-two symphonies. The two concertos on the present disc are highly virtuosic, the D-major concerto especially notable for its dark-hued, near-tragic slow movement. They’re both attractive works.
The two symphonies by Graf, following the early-Classical three-movement model, have a little less profile. They’re exuberant and well wrought, but there isn’t a lot to distinguish them from other symphonies of the early-Classical period by folks like Carl Stamitz and Leopold Mozart. Still, it’s nice to have them in enthusiastic, well-played performances like the current ones.
This is the first time I’ve encountered L’arpe festante, but the original-instruments orchestra has been around since 1983 and on the evidence of this recording is an outstanding group of musicians. Klaus-Dieter Brandt is himself a specialist in historical performance practice; he plays this elegant music feelingly, using two German cellos from the eighteenth century to give his work a special patina of authenticity. Add an excellent recording that captures the appealingly resonant surround of a hall in a Baroque palace (Schloss Fasanerie), and you have a very fine production on all scores.
-Lee Passarella