Clare O’Connell: Light Flowing

The Strad Issue: June 2025

Description: Riches aplenty in an album of commissions from an enterprising cellist

Musicians: Clare O’Connell (cello) Eleanor Turner (harp) Marianne Schofield (double bass)

Works: Finnis: Three Solos; Figures of Eight. Hall: You Sail to the Sky. Klouda: ŪhtĊeare. Levienaise-Farrouch: Opened: Four Studies. Martin: Vocalises I & II. Mills: Zenith

Catalogue number: NMC NMCD287

In the booklet, Edmund Finnis writes about the ‘joy, focus and consolation’ of learning the cello in his youth. Without sight of the score, I imagine what pleasure learning his Three Solos would have brought me as a teenage cellist. In fact, all the music on this album of commissions by Clare O’Connell makes imaginative play with the instrument’s open strings, even when retuned to D-G-D-A by Emily Hall for a breathy, quietly rapturous fantasia on double-stops, inspired by a lyric in a Nick Drake song.

A collection of modern cello solos will likely tend towards the moody and elegiac. Sequences in Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s quartet of studies, written for O’Connell playing over pre-recorded loops of herself, pan across the horizon like a lengthy tracking shot in a nouvelle vague movie. There’s a stronger sense of both direction and personality about Natalie Klouda’s evocation of a dawn chorus.

Played back to back, the meditations by Nick Martin and Alex Mills might induce a blissed-out half-hour. Taken on its own, Zenith draws strong arches of melody in a slow crescendo, punctuated by Eleanor Turner’s harp. Another triptych by Finnis ends the album ends the album on a high note. The recording brings us in almost to the bridge of both cello and bass, catching the grain of their sound with captivating fidelity.

PETER QUANTRILL