Lalo: Cello Concerto In D Minor / Cello Sonata

Description

Edouard Lalo(1823-1892)Cello Concerto; Sonatafor cello & piano; Chants russesOf remote Spanish ancestry, Edouard Lalo was born in 1823 in Lille, apart of France in which his forebears had settled some 250 years earlier. As aboy he studied the violin and the cello at Lille Conservatory, but his father,a former soldier in a family of continuing military traditions, prudentlyobjected to a musical career for his son. Denied further parental support, Lalomoved to Paris where, in 1839, he entered the violin class of Habeneck, whilestudying composition privately with the pianist Julius Schulhoff and then withJ.E. Cr?¿vecceur. He went on to earn his living first as a teacher and as aviolinist and in 1855 joined with the violinist Jules Armingaud and cellistLeon Jacquard in the establishment of a quartet under Armingaud's leadership.The Armingaud Quartet, in which Lalo at first played the viola, won aconsiderable reputation for itself, not least for its performances ofBeethoven's quartets, which had at that time not been widely heard, and for arepertoire that ranged from Haydn and Mozart to Schumann and Mendelssohn.Lalo's marriage in 1865 to a singer brought the composition of songs and thefollowing year an unsuccessful attempt at opera, Fiesque, entered for acompetition in which it failed to win a prize, but the source of the laterorchestral Divertissemeut, which uses the ballet music from the opera.It was in the 1870s that Lalo began to come into his own as a composer,materially assisted by the Societe Nationale de Musique, established under theleadership of Camille Saint-Sa?½ns and the singing teacher Romain Bussine in theaftermath of the French defeat and capitulation at Sedan in 1871. Lalo haddestroyed the two symphonies he had written earlier in his career, but theperformance of his Violin Concerto, Opus 20, and the Symphonieespagnole by Pablo Sarasate, who had commissioned the work, won himincreasing recognition. A Cello Concerto followed in 1877 and in 1879the violinist Martin Marsick, a pupil of Joachim, gave the firstperformance of the Concerto russe, Opus 29. The following decade broughtLalo's only surviving Symphony and his Piano Concerto in F minor. Turninghis attention once more to the theatre, he won appreciation from some for hisballet Namouna, at least in the concert hall, with music that was muchadmired by the young Debussy, who had caused some disturbance at the Opera byhis display of enthusiasm, approval that persuaded the subscribers to securethe future banning of Conservatoire composition students from the Conservatoirebox. Namouna, centering on the slave-girl of the title, lost in a wagerby her master, was given only fifteen performances at the Opera, where it wasstaged in 1882 and Lalo was able to make use of some of the score again in his Symphony.He enjoyed final theatrical triumph, however, with his opera Le roid'Ys, staged at the Opera-Comique in 1888. Based on a Breton legend, with aprincipal mezzo-soprano r??le originally des