Antonín Dvorák’s Cello Concerto is one of the absolute masterpieces of the genre, and every world-class cellist naturally takes it into his repertoire. This is also the case for Daniel Müller-Schott.

Dvorák began his work in passionate, stormy mood, but completed it in lyrical, elegiac vein under the shadow of the illness and death of his sister-in-law Josefina, who had been his own first love.

Müller-Schott’s new recording also includes several chamber music works and arrangements that offer insight as to how Dvorák gradually accustomed himself to the cello, up to the point when he composed his concerto in 1894-5.

There is the catchy Rondo that Dvorák wrote in 1892 for a chamber music tour, and Silent Woods, an arrangement made for the same tour, heard here in Dvorák’s own orchestral versions.

Together with the pianist Robert Kulek, Müller-Schott has also recorded arrangements of the four Romantic Pieces op.75 and of Songs my mother taught me from the Gypsy Songs cycle. The latter is perfectly suited to the cello’s cantabile character and Daniel Müller-Schott’s interpretation.