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Reinecke: Complete Works for Cello and Piano

Naxos 8.573727
Recording Date: 
18-19 Jan 2018
Recording Venue: 
Schloss Weinberg, Kefermarkt/Austria
Release: 
April 2019

Yet another discovery. It will always remain a mystery to me why in this day and age, when more and more music becomes available to an increasingly wide audience, less and less music is being played on stage. I am the last person to say that the Brahms sonatas should not be played, but by everyone in every cello recital? As I am writing this little blurb about this recording in March 2019 upon its release, I suspect that I might never play any of the Reinecke works in concert, even if each of them is a real gem. Learning and rehearsing these sonatas was a true joy, and discovering the pieces Op. 146 rounded off the experience. I am very happy that this recording materialized, and I hope that many fellow cellists decide to program one of these pieces, opposing concert promoters who tell them that nobody will come. Go listen!

A little side note on the cover: Alfred Hackländer (1907-1968), a painter from Solingen, did this painting of "Äckerle" in Lauf (Germany) for my grandfather. It shows the house where my father's family lived for a long time - and some distant relatives still live. My great-grandfather Severin Rummel was the last of my immediate relatives to be born there (he died as a soldier in France, in the early days of WW I). My father tells me that until the 1950s, it pretty much looked the same as in this painting. Today, of course, it is a modernized family home.