Wood on the Tracks
Cellophonics
rec. 2025, Menuhin Hall, Stoke d’Abernon, UK
SOMM Recordings SOMMCD0731 [67]
Cellophonics is a cello quartet. Its album ‘Wood on the Tracks’ is not quite the tribute to Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ that you might have anticipated – that’s if you anticipated it at all. It only relates to Guy Barker’s composition. The rest is an eclectic collection of pieces for a relatively unusual instrumental combination.
Certainly, the York Bowen Fanclub will be interested in the Suite for Four Cellos, discovered by one of the members of Cellophonics, Ben Rogerson, whose grandfather Haydn Rogerson had been principal cello of the Hallé Orchestra under Hamilton Harty. The Suite was written for four young students and performed in 1930. It has an unusual expressive density, as well as a melancholy cast, for young players, one of whom was only twelve, but the three movements move from the depth of the opening Prelude through the dance patterns of a Sarabande to the brilliant folklike fugato of the concluding gigue – a motion from darkness to light. It’s played with real brio and brilliance by Cellophonics.
Though the Bowen is the one piece one feels sure is known, it’s not been recorded before, something that applies to the whole programme, another valuable element of the disc. Roderick Elms’ Divertimento is a recent piece, dating from 2025, one that opens with a false trail of introversion that soon opens out in a syncopated rush of texturally rich and lyrically nourishing writing. Contrasts ensure that the rhythmically vital and the slowly ruminative co-mingle before a finale shrug of energy that’s laced with English Light Music virtues. Delightful. William Alwyn’s Two Irish Tunes offer a stark contrast: melancholy stasis followed by a Grainger-drenched and pizzicato-laced, vivid ‘A Wee Bag of Praties’.
The longest single piece is Julia Simpson’s Mariposa. I recall Simpson’s The Tunnel with pleasure, from a Meridian viola disc I reviewed a couple of years ago. Mariposa traces the journey of the monarch butterfly from Canada to Mexico and back again. The piece opens with hand clapping representing Mexican villagers awaiting the butterflies believed to carry the soul of their ancestors. Thenceforth tremolandos and stern unisons, pizzicato and popular rhythms form part of the journey – an eventful, lucid and engaging one.
Rowland Sutherland is another contemporary composer whose Hope is an unfolding baroque-based piece that admits some Eastern influence and attractive rhythmic vitality. The Aria by Marie Dare is the sixth of her Six Pieces for Cello Quartet and attractive if somewhat predictable. Guy Barker’s title piece is in two movements and will appeal to those who enjoy train studies, whether by Honegger, Duke Ellington or Meade Lux Lewis. Blues cadences haunt the first, ‘The Big Ugly’, which speeds up, decelerates and is full of pulsating incident. The second is ‘Altoona Express’ which shares a similar mood in its opening panel but then bursts into rugged, jagged, propulsion, stamps, and vernacular locomotive rhythms; this is definitely a big old American engine, not a more sedate and sleekly elegant British one. Simon Baggs ends the recital with his warmly mellifluous and introspective Soliloquy.
Cellophonics commissioned the works by Elms, Simpson, Sutherland, Barker and Baggs and the composers have repaid them with eventful, sonically attractive and thematically rewarding pieces. The recording in the Menuhin Hall, Stoke d’Abernon is first class and I commend Somm’s booklet for its informative and attractive look.
Jonathan Woolf
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Contents
York Bowen (1884-1961)
Suite for Four Cellos (c.1930)
Roderick Elms (b.1951)
Divertimento for Cello Quartet (2025)
William Alwyn (1905-1985)
Two Irish Tunes for Cello Quartet (1933)
Julia Simpson (b.1977)
Mariposa
Rowland Sutherland
Hope
Marie Dare (1902-1976)
Six Pieces for Cello Quartet: IV. Aria
Guy Barker (b.1957)
Wood on the Tracks
Simon Baggs (b.1973)
Soliloquy (2024)
Performers
Christopher Allan, Adrian Bradbury, Ian Burdge, Ben Rogerson
