Bridge, Britten, Debussy: Cello Sonatas

Frank Bridge began his Cello Sonata in 1913, the final full year of peace before the First World War. Truls Mørk squeezes every drop of heart-on-sleeve expression from its opening movement, which emerges here as an impassioned overture to the more introspective, unsettling world of its wartime companion, a lyrical “Adagio” destined to be swept away on a rising tide of musical agitation. Benjamin Britten, Bridge’s star pupil, wrote his own Cello Sonata during a thaw in the Cold War. Mørk and his regular duo partner, Håvard Gimse, shape its music with near telepathic artistry. The cellist’s enormous, multi-hued sound brings benefits to Debussy’s Cello Sonata, another product of the so-called Great War, especially in its central “Sérénade,” and to the poetic twists and turns of Janáček’s Pohádka (“Fairy Tale”).