Steffan Morris: Brahms, Stanford

The Strad Issue: October 2025

Description: Balance is here nicely judged in these much-recorded works

Musicians: Steffan Morris (cello) Alasdair Beatson (piano)

Works: Brahms: Cello Sonatas: no.1 in E minor, no.2 in F major. Stanford: Ballata

Catalogue number: RUBICON RCD1196

Brahms’s two cello sonatas are a cornerstone of the repertoire and a rite of passage for any cellist but seem contradictory: the first by a man in his twenties but appearing to recollect in tranquillity, the second almost young man’s music in its passionate outpouring, although composed as Brahms entered his final phase of composition.

Steffan Morris brings to both works a strain of lyricism and concern for a constantly singing line that is rewarding throughout. While others may be more demonstrative or responsive to Brahms’s shifting moods, Morris maintains a degree of composure that is nevertheless offset by the warm tone of his ‘very rare’ 1685 Girolamo Amati II instrument.

His lightness of touch imparts a pleasing lilt to the central minuet of the E minor Sonata and prevents the closing fugue from becoming (as it occasionally can) a grim grind. Alasdair Beatson’s ardent support is ideally judged in music that can often be difficult to balance, whether sympathetic to the low cello tessitura of the E minor or taking care not to dominate in the thickly written F major; the recording (at Wigmore Hall) is close, but generous enough to make the instruments sound real and not contrived.

Morris offers as an envoi a Ballata by Stanford that betrays a debt as much to Tchaikovsky as to Brahms.

DAVID THREASHER