BBC Music Magazine

This album brings together Schumann’s great duo works for cello with three fascinating Murail pieces, culminating in his new arrangements of Kinderszenen. The result is an iridescent sonic weave which lingers long in the ear.

Marie Ythier is a discovery for me: a musician of exquisite subtlety and charisma, whose every phrase is alive with penetrating intelligence. Despite Murail’s initial indifference to his Romantic forebear, she intuited the connection, articulated in his revealing booklet note where he identifies the ‘elegant instability’ in Schumann’s music as a spur.

His Attracteurs étranges for cello solo delves into turbulence, melodies spiralling and twisting in graceful arabesques, frictionless airiness juxtaposed with punchy pizzicato. Une lettre de Vincent takes as its starting point the rhythm of the phrase ‘Cher Vincent’, deftly implying the sad tenderness of Theo’s missive to his brother, illuminating the strange, anxious space separating them. The earliest of his pieces, C’est un jardin secret…(1974) is a precision-made ghostly miniature, In Ythier’s hands it’s a four-minute opera.

Ythier and Marie Vermeulin deliver Schumann’s folk-style and fantasy pieces with quick-fire wit and disarming eloquence. The circus comes to town for Murail’s arrangements of Kinderszenen: they tremble on the edge of Poulencian kitsch, with prepared piano and flutter-tongued flue adding startling effects. The cello becomes a musical saw in ‘Von fremden Ländern’, a frosty breath chills the deep-dreaming ‘Kind im Einschlummern’, the dust flies up in a breathless ‘Hasche-Mann.’
Performance: (five stars) Recording (five stars) “Chamber Choice, October 2019”
Helen Wallace (BBC Music Magazine)

—Helen Wallace