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"Feuermann had everything: an intense, focused tone that sings with expressive economy, controlled warmth, centered intonation, a smooth yet variegated bow arm, one of the most adroit left hands in the business (what effortless double stops!), unswerving integrity, and impeccable taste."(Jed Distler, Classics Today)
Dvorak's Cello Concerto is without doubt one of the greatest of them all, with perhaps only Elgar's challenging for supremacy, and in the view of some critics is the composer's finest work, "the crowning achievement of Dvorak's copious and warm-hearted genius" according to 1955's The Record Guide. Written in the United States through the winter of 1884-5, and then finalised with a revision of the final sixty bars some months later when the composer had returned to Bohemia, there are conflicting stories about the genesis of the Concerto, though both firmly point to American cellists as the source of Dvorak's stimulus. It is likely that the work was originally intended to have an America première, but this came to nothing when the cellist Hanus Wihan, which whom Dvorak had make a successful tour in1891-2, was refused permission to modify the solo part with his own cadenzas. Thus the première took place in London on 19th March, 1896, with the composer conducting the Philharmonic and Leo Stern as soloist, and it would be a further nine months before the US première took place in Boston.
This Recording and its Remastering Feuermann's Dvorak Cello Concerto was the first recording of the work in its entirety, though it was recorded on two separate sessions more than a year apart, and these recordings were issued separately. We are lucky that the first two movements were so well recorded, especially given the early date of this electric recording (the microphone method had only started to take over from acoustic horn recording some 3 years earlier). However, the later session sounds like a technical disaster - everything the engineers got right in the first session seemed to go wrong in the second - poor treble response, excessive hiss, and just about nothing in the bass and lower mid-range below (200Hz) - just the frequencies one wishes to find with a cello recording. This has therefore been a particularly troublesome restoration, and one which I've considered abandoning on a number of occasions as not coming up to scratch. Trying a conventional transfer and restoration of these discs is a tricky matter - to attempt to apply XR processing and bring out previously hidden frequencies whilst correcting those that are clear is exceptionally difficult, and the results are, in places, indicative of the origins of the source material. However, on balance i decided to go ahead and issue the recording, as the overall effect of both the remastering and of Feuermann's stunning performance is simply too good to leave to one side.
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