The chief novelty of this release by cellist Steven Isserlis is the "trench cello" of British soldier Harold Triggs, not just a cello that was taken into the trenches, but a portable instrument that could be disassembled and packed into a box. Isserlis plays the actual instrument, lost to Triggs when he was captured by the Germans, but reunited with him in 1962 near the end of his life. There's nothing so extraordinary about its sound, although it's quite good all things considered, but hearing the appropriate pieces ...
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The chief novelty of this release by cellist Steven Isserlis is the "trench cello" of British soldier Harold Triggs, not just a cello that was taken into the trenches, but a portable instrument that could be disassembled and packed into a box. Isserlis plays the actual instrument, lost to Triggs when he was captured by the Germans, but reunited with him in 1962 near the end of his life. There's nothing so extraordinary about its sound, although it's quite good all things considered, but hearing the appropriate pieces selected by Isserlis, including God Save the King and Ivor Novello's Keep the Home Fires Burning, is undeniably haunting. (The cello on the album's front cover is not the Triggs item, but a different homemade cello of the period.) The other works, played on Isserlis' usual instrument, are only tangentially connected to the War, but the cello's melancholic voice seems somehow evocative, and the defiantly French style of the Debussy Cello Sonata fits the mood. It's also worth being reminded...
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