Alisa Weilerstein & Trondheim Soloists - Transfigured Night (2018) [CD-Rip]

This release on the Dutch audiophile label PentaTone pairing American cellist Alisa Weilerstein with the conductorless Norwegian Trondheim Soloists, carries the general title Transfigured Night, suggesting not only Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, played here in a 1943 version for string orchestra, but that the theme somehow applies to the entire album. In fact it doesn't; the two Haydn cello concertos inhabit a different world from Schoenberg, and there isn't much reason to put the three works together. The Haydn concertos, with Weilerstein leading from the cello, don't respond particularly well to the democratic-ensemble treatment; the music vacillates between minimizing the role of the soloist and, in blistering finales, exaggerating it. But all is forgiven when you get to the titular main attraction: the work's feverish, nervous intensity has rarely been rendered so effectively, and the performance is a collage of instrumental detail. You may wonder about the advertised soloist's role in the interpretation of a work that is not soloistic, but apparently the performance was shaped by Weilerstein as well as by concertmaster Geir Inge Lotsberg. However it came about, it's an extraordinary, revelatory reading. Audiophile though the label may be, the acoustics of the medieval church where the music was recorded resemble no venue in which either the Haydn or the Schoenberg would have been played. ~ James Manheim