Dvorak: Cello Concerto & Pieces Benedict Kloeckner & Danae Dörken & Romanian Chamber Orchestra & Cristian Măcelaru

‘It's a piece of wood that shrieks at the top and hums at the bottom!’ is how Antonín Dvořák described the cello. Nevertheless, he wrote some of the most beautiful works for cello, all of which are collected here for the first time on a CD. I also took the liberty of adding a few arrangements of works that I particularly love.

Among them is the song ‘Leave me alone’ which plays an essential role in Dvořák's Cello Concerto. It was a song dedicated to Josefina Čermáková, a girl he loved in his youth, who died while he was composing the cello concerto.

He had already fallen in love with her as a young man, but his love for her remained unrequited, and he later married her sister. (A situation you might want to avoid, should you ever find yourself in such a predicament!)

He kept in close contact with Josefina throughout his life, especially during the times when he was homesick and living far away from Prague in New York.

He composed a moving tribute to her in the Cello Concerto, in which he quotes this song in its second movement and again at the end of the concerto in a very touching and poignant way. And it is with this background that this album is not only to be understood as a Slavic rhapsody, but also as an ode to the sincerity of life with all its beauty, tragedy, missed opportunities, longing, loss, happiness, and true lifelong love, and last but not least, of course, as a tribute to the great composer and converted cello-lover Antonín Dvořak.