Featured Album April 2025: Steven Isserlis "Music of the Angels"

This month, our Featured Album is a coming together of two iconic cellists of their respective generations. Italian composer and performer Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) wrote many virtuosic works for his own instrument, which are interpreted here by celebrated British cellist Steven Isserlis. Released late last year on Hyperion Records, read on to find out more about the collection....

Music of the Angels: Cello Concertos, Sonatas & Quintets by Luigi Boccherini
Steven Isserlis

with Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Maggie Cole (harpsichord), Luise Buchberger (cello), Jonian Ilias Kadesha, Irène Duval (violins), Eivind Ringstad (viola), Tim Posner (cello)

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR APRIL 2025

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From the artist's press release:

Boccherini's cello concertos, some twelve in number, were written comparatively early in his career, all dating from the years during which he toured as a virtuoso. And by the way: what a virtuoso! Presuming that he could play his own music—which I think is a fair presumption—he must have been a truly wonderful player; one can feel it in the writing, as challenging as anything composed for the cello before the twentieth century, at least. (The great Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, an avid Boccheriniphile, considered Boccherini to have been, on the evidence of his music, the greatest cellist of all time.)

Featured on BBC Radio 3's Record Review: 'The sheer beauty and virtuosity of the music and the way, as Isserlis puts it, Boccherini's ultra-light scoring, sometimes with just cello and violins, leaves the cellist sharing the same stratosphere as they do – a remarkably translucent and ethereal effect, truly music of the angels. It is a lovely album.'

'Here all Boccherini's virtues are on full display: easy melodicism, harmonic sweetness, exquisite string textures and a personal sound world.' – The Strad

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Music of the Angels":

‘Has there ever been a composer of more consistent elegance?’ askes cellist Steven Isserlis in his liner notes to his latest album, devoted to Boccherini. On the evidence of this CD, it’s clearly a rhetorical question from the British cellist, whose performances of two concertos, two sonatas and a string quintet exude elegance, grace, charm and beauty throughout the 76 minute-programme. Throughout, Isserlis is on top form, whether partnered by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the concertos, or with his chamber music colleagues in the pair of sonatas or the D minor String Quintet. Boccherini was celebrated for his string quintets (string quartet + a second cello, as in Schubert); the D minor Quintet on this CD is one of the composer’s most remarkable and original, whose finale is – unexpectedly – a fully worked-out fugue, yet one that is imbued with the Boccherini’s innate Italian lyricism.

The pair of concertos – in D major and in A major (the latter known as ‘The Frog’ owing to the leaping intervals of one of its themes) – dance along with great spirit and playfulness, soloist and orchestra held in perfect balance. Isserlis is a fine chamber musician, as evinced by the album’s pair of sonatas (in C minor, and in F major, the latter with a second cello), while the D minor Quintet is one of the CD’s highlights.

While Isserlis’s enthusiasm for the Marx Brothers is well-known, he may well also have a weakness for the post-war Ealing comedies, one of which – The Ladykillers – made the Minuet and Trio from Boccherini’s E major Quintet instantly familiar to a whole post-war generation. Included on the album as a built-in encore, it here reveals itself as, to quote the cellist again, ‘a gem – subtle and perfect’.

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Music of the Angels is available from The Early Music Shop online or in our Snape Maltings showroom.

Click here to order now!

Click below to watch Steven Isserlis discuss the album and performing music by Luigi Boccherini: