On this album, Andre Previn, noted film composer/conductor, conducts the London Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo Ma as the featured soloist on these two great twentieth century cello pieces. Elgar is best known for Pomp & Circumstance and the Enigma Variations, but this concerto is considered one of the premiere pieces for cello, probably THE premiere piece of the twentieth century. The Walton piece is less well known. I really enjoyed this CD a lot. Both pieces are really heavily thematic and so you get a lot of nice themes, catchy and often quite beautiful. Walton’s Concerto has a surprising dissonant, somewhat menacing theme that I quite liked. The CD runs a bit over an hour; each piece is around thirty minutes, give or take, with Elgar’s being a bit longer. Good performances, great pieces. The one quibble is that the sound quality is a bit muted. But that’s a risk you always run with classical CDs, especially older ones. On the whole, I really liked this. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – great, iconic cello concertos get solid, very good performances; sound quality is a little variable, but that’s really the only problem here. 3 ½ stars.