Weinberg & Dutilleux: concerti

Cellist Edgar Moreau, with the WDR Sinfonieorchester and conductor Andris Poga, performs two concertante works from the mid-20th century:  Mieczysław Weinberg’s Concerto in C minor (1956), and Henri Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain … (1970). Both were premiered by the great Mstislav Rostropovich, which creates a special link with Moreau: in 2014 in Paris, he won the Young Soloist Prize in the Rostropovich Cello Competition. In recent years, interest has grown in the music of the Polish-born Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg, who was mentored by Shostakovich. The title Tout un monde lointain … evokes a distant world, and Dutilleux’s five-movement work does indeed take us to a very different place from Weinberg’s, drawing inspiration from the sensuous poems of Charles Baudelaire. Praising Edgar Moreau’s last Erato album, Transmission, Gramophone wrote: “His tone is beautiful, his phrasing rapt, and the intensity of his delivery is magnified in the immediacy of his presence in the sound picture.”