Julian Lloyd Webber can still remember the first time he heard the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich play. He was 13, and the impact was profound. “I thought, ‘This is someone who is trying to bring music to everybody. It doesn’t matter who it is,’” the British cellist and conductor tells Apple Music. “I’ve always believed in that. I’ve always thought that the greatest music is for everybody.” From his first recordings, made in the ’70s, Lloyd Webber has devoted his life to playing music across the entire classical spectrum—from the great concertos and sonatas to charming rarities, sumptuous arrangements, and specially commissioned pieces. Music, in fact, for everyone.
You’ll find all of that on The Singing Strad, released as Lloyd Weber marks his 70th birthday in 2021. The album is a celebration of the incredible breadth of his work—and his legacy. Narrowing down more than two decades’ worth of music was, admits the cellist, a challenge. “I must have made at least 20 albums for [classical label] Philips over the years, maybe more,” says Lloyd Webber. “I divided it into British, French, and Russian music, with a mix of big works and smaller pieces.” The opening tracks here are devoted to English music, beginning with the Elgar Cello Concerto. It’s a fitting start: Lloyd Webber’s unforgettable 1986 recording of the great 1919 masterpiece, alongside The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Yehudi Menuhin, is still regarded as one of the very finest. “There was a spiritual quality about working with someone who actually recorded with Elgar,” reflects Lloyd Webber of collaborating with Menuhin, one of the great violinists of the 20th century. “It was very special.”
Lloyd Webber cherishes such unique and special connections with music. His recording of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, for instance, was conducted by the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s son Maxim, who, says the cellist, is “absolutely rooted in the Russian tradition.” For his recording of French composer Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1, Lloyd Webber insisted on a conductor with an innate understanding not only of the music, but also of the cello itself. French conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier, son of the legendary cellist Paul Tortelier, fit the bill perfectly, described by Lloyd Webber as “one of my favorite cellists.”
But alongside those enduring masterpieces, he is just as proud of the lesser-known pieces he has championed, and which have gone on to win the hearts of cellists and audiences everywhere. These include Borodin’s “Nocturne”—arranged for cello and orchestra from the composer’s String Quartet No. 2—Glazunov’s haunting “Mélodie, Op. 20 No. 1,” and Holst’s beautiful “Invocation, Op. 19 No. 2.” “I felt the cello repertoire needed to be bigger,” says Lloyd Webber, in something of an understatement regarding just how far he has pushed the boundaries of his instrument’s possibilities. “And now the Holst is played quite a lot these days.” As is the “Requiem: Pie Jesu” by Lloyd Webber’s elder brother, Andrew, a composer without whom this collection would surely be incomplete.
At the heart of this celebratory album, of course, sits Lloyd Webber’s great Barjansky Stradivarius cello—the “singing Strad” from which the collection takes its name. He bought the instrument at auction in 1983 and signed to the Philips record label the following year. “Once I got that cello, I played on it for the rest of my career,” he says. “From 1984 onwards, I recorded everything on the Strad. If there’s one quality that that instrument has, it’s an ability to sing.”