Go around the world playing concerts and not have much interaction with the audience, but in smaller venues you can see the colour of their eyes and you get to talk to them. “It’s a more intimate concert than I would usually give,” Julian tells me during our Tuesday morning interview. He will also read from his memoirs and take questions from the audience. Travels With My Cello will see Julian perform pieces by Bach, Fauré, Sant-Saëns, and Debussy, as well as work by his father and brother. As part of this tour Julian will make his Galway debut when he plays the Town Hall Theatre on Thursday November 3 at 8pm. To mark his birthday the cellist is playing a series of concerts entitled Travels With My Cello - an evening with Julian Lloyd Webber, throughout Ireland next month. This year saw the birth of Julian and wife Jiaxin Cheng’s daughter Jasmine Orienta the release of the double-CD collection The Art of Julian Lloyd Webber and Julian’s 60th birthday. If there’s one quality that that instrument has, it’s an ability to sing.2011 HAS been a milestone for Julian Lloyd Webber, one of the greatest and most admired cellists of our time. “From 1984 onwards, I recorded everything on the Strad. “Once I got that cello, I played on it for the rest of my career,” he says. He bought the instrument at auction in 1983 and signed to the Philips record label the following year. “And now the Holst is played quite a lot these days.” As is the “Requiem: Pie Jesu” by Lloyd Webber’s elder brother, Andrew, a composer without whom this collection would surely be incomplete.Īt the heart of this celebratory album, of course, sits Lloyd Webber’s great Barjansky Stradivarius cello-the “singing Strad” from which the collection takes its name. “I felt the cello repertoire needed to be bigger,” says Lloyd Webber, in something of an understatement regarding just how far he has pushed the boundaries of his instrument’s possibilities. 1” and Holst’s beautiful “Invocation, Op. These include Borodin’s “Nocturne”-arranged for cello and orchestra from the composer’s String Quartet No. French conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier, son of the legendary cellist Paul Tortelier, fit the bill perfectly, described by Lloyd Webber as “one of my favourite cellists”.īut alongside those enduring masterpieces, he is just as proud of the lesser-known pieces he has championed, and which have gone on to win the hearts of cellists and audiences everywhere. 1, Lloyd Webber insisted on a conductor with an innate understanding not only of the music, but also of the cello itself. For his recording of French composer Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. His recording of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, for instance, was conducted by the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s son Maxim, who, says the cellist, is “absolutely rooted in the Russian tradition”. Lloyd Webber cherishes such unique and special connections with music. “There was a spiritual quality about working with someone who actually recorded with Elgar,” reflects Lloyd Webber of collaborating with Menuhin, one of the great violinists of the 20th century. It’s a fitting start: Lloyd Webber’s unforgettable 1986 recording of the great 1919 masterpiece, alongside The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Yehudi Menuhin, is still regarded as one of the very finest. “I divided it into British, French and Russian music, with a mix of big works and smaller pieces.” The opening tracks here are devoted to English music, beginning with the Elgar Cello Concerto. “I must have made at least 20 albums for Philips over the years, maybe more,” says Lloyd Webber. Narrowing down more than two decades’ worth of music was, admits the cellist, a challenge. The album is a celebration of the incredible breadth of his work-and his legacy. You’ll find all of that on The Singing Strad, released as Lloyd Weber marks his 70th birthday in 2021. I’ve always thought that the greatest music is for everybody.” From his first recordings, made in the ’70s, Lloyd Webber has devoted his life to playing music across the entire classical spectrum-from the great concertos and sonatas to charming rarities, sumptuous arrangements and specially commissioned pieces. It doesn’t matter who it is,’” the British cellist and conductor tells Apple Music. “I thought, ‘This is someone who is trying to bring music to everybody. Julian Lloyd Webber can still remember the first time he heard the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich play.
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