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DON’T MISS IT!Christian Tetzla
records two great
violin concertos
As he returns to the concertos
of Beethoven and Sibelius, the
Gramophone Award-winning
violinist talks to James Jolly about
the new musical balance in his lifeStanford’s operas
His work as an opera composer,
not to mention as a writer of
orchestral and chamber music,
is finally being recognised, says
Stanford scholar Jeremy DibbleCollection: Carnival
of the Animals
Which recording of Saint-Saëns’s
witty portraits is the one to own?
Jeremy Nicholas investigatesOBITUARIES
A pioneering Dutch cellist, and the founder of a major US labelANNERBYLSMA
Cellist
BornFebruary17, 1934
DiedJuly25, 2019
One of the great
pioneering figures in
historically informed
performance practice
of cello repertory has
died aged 85. Born in
The Hague, Anner
Bylsma studied at the
city’s Royal Conservatory, winning the
Prix d’Excellence in 1957. Two years later
he took First Prize in the Pablo Casals
Competition in Mexico. He played in the
Dutch National Orchestra and later, in
1962, joined the Concertgebouw
Orchestra in Amsterdam, serving as
Principal Cello for six years. He would
perform with Frans Brüggen and Gustav
Leonhardt, and later with his wife, the
violinist Vera Beths, and the viola player
Jürgen Kussmaul who collectively formed
the core of a flexible string group called
L’Archibudelli. He also played with the
Smithsonian Chamber Players.
Bach’s Six Cello Suites became a major
focus of Bylsma’s musical life. He wrote
a study of them in 1998 called Bach, the
Fencing Master and he recorded them
twice – first for RCA in 1979 and then in
1992 for Sony Classical’s Vivarte label.
Of the 1979 set, Gramophone’s Nicholas
Anderson wrote: ‘These were for me, and
probably for many readers, revelatory
performances, as significant a landmark,
though for different reasons, as those of
Casals were in the mid- to late-1930s.’
Anderson later commented of the 1992
recording, made on a Stradivarius cello:
‘Here is an artist who is not afraid
to express himself both individually
and intensely and who understands –
indeed seems to feel – the graceful
contours of these superlative pieces with
acute sensibility.’
Bylsma was a musician who was
admired by cellists of all interpretative
hues, and listened to as attentively by
practitioners of the ‘modern style’ as by
those who aimed for a more ‘authentic
approach’. In an interview with Lindsay
Kemp in Gramophone’s March 1995 issue,
Bylsma said: ‘An interviewer once asked
me, “What is authentic?”, and I said it is
when you hear someone play a piece that
you know extremely well and it suddenly
appears still more beautiful than it was.One thing must be true of all music, and
that is that it’s alive, that you are taken
away from your sorrows by it. That’s
what it’s all about.’JACK RENNER
Founder and Chief Recording Engineer,
Telarc
BornApril13, 1935
DiedJune20, 2019
Telarc’s Jack Renner
has died at the age
of 84 following
a battle with cancer.
A trumpeter from
the age of 10,
he studied at the
Ohio State University
in Columbus, Ohio. He worked as
a professional trumpeter before turning
his talents to recording, with notable
success. His recording philosophy was
to reproduce what he described as the
‘best seat in the house’. He also taught
audio recording for three decades at
the Cleveland Institute of Music, which
awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of
Musical Arts in 1997.
In 1977, with Robert Woods, Renner
founded Telarc, based in Cleveland,
Ohio. The company built its reputation
on its audiophile approach, capturing the
work of ensembles like the Cincinnati
Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra,
Atlanta Symphony and, later, the Vienna
Philharmonic. It was an approach
that secured it numerous Grammy
nominations and awards (Renner won Best
Engineered Classical Album 22 times) and
Gramophone’s Label of the Year in 2004,
as well as Gramophone’s Choral Award
in 1988 for the Robert Shaw recording
of Verdi’s Requiem; ‘To clinch Telarc’s
superiority, they have the most exciting,
immediate recording of a chorus I have
yet encountered in this work,’ wrote
Alan Blyth at the time of the recording’s
release. Telarc was the first label to
sign the young Lang Lang, whose 2001
BBC Proms concert – Rachmaninov’s
Third Piano Concerto and solo works by
Scriabin – was his debut release.
Telarc released more than 1200
recordings and would earn the gratitude
of audiophiles and music lovers the world
over for the astounding immediacy of
the company’s recorded sound, achieved
through the work of Renner and his
fellow engineer Michael Bishop.