LDV42

GARY HOFFMAN | LIÈGE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC | CHRISTIANARMING 23 If Bloch wrote Schelomo for the cello, it was because Barjansky’s timbre evoked for him that of the human voice, and indeed of Solomon’s voice in particular: ‘For years I had a number of sketches for the book of Ecclesiastes which I had wanted to set to music, but the French language was not adaptable to my rhythmic patterns. Nor was German or English, and I hadn’t a good enough command of Hebrew. Thus the sketches accumulated and . . . lay dormant.’ Finally the meditative tone of Barjansky’s cello awakened and structured them in a work where the instrument’s soliloquies develop a recitative style unprecedented in the modern cello literature. Bloch clothes the work in an orientalising orchestration that plunges us into the reconstruction of an immemorial Jerusalem, and infuses the material with elements of synagogal chant (the blessing Asher kid’shonu b’mitsvosov among others). The crescendos that do violence to the discourse while at the same time solidifying the structure of the work start out from the cello, which leads the orchestra on and allows it to paraphrase the solo material in spectacular deployments. When the silence has been restored, the king/cello meditates once more, until the resignation of a sombre conclusion devoid of hope.