Cellist Pablo Ferrández Releases Night Sessions Vol. 2 on Sony Classical

Private Moments from Cellist Pablo Ferrández

Sony Classical Releases Night Sessions Vol. 2

Out Today – Listen Here

For his latest EP on Sony Classical, Pablo Ferrández invites listeners to eavesdrop on some of the most intimate and meaningful moments in his life.

Each track on Night Sessions Vol. 2 is connected to a memory dear to the Spanish cellist’s life. It opens with the serene melody of Elgar’s Salut d’Amour - music that came on the radio each evening when Ferrández was bathed by his mother as a baby. ‘I recorded this song for her,’ he says.

The cellist’s intimate recital continues with the first music he played outside Spain, a work Alexander Glazunov dedicated to the Tsar’s cellist in 1901, Chant du ménestrel. Playing this sensitive, poetic piece in the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow was, for the teenage Ferrández, ‘the biggest deal’.

Saint-Saëns’s ‘The Swan’ - the most popular movement of the composer’s Carnival of the Animals - holds special memories for the cellist. He heard it performed by a hotel band while on holiday with his family as a child, and recalls eventually being invited to join the musicians to perform it. The piece gets a soulful performance here from Ferrández and his partner on all four tracks, the pianist Julien Quentin.

More recent memories are evoked by the final track, Schumann’s ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’, an arrangement of the song in which the composer compared his wife Clara to a flower in bloom. This was the music played when Ferrández and his fiancé walked up the aisle to marry recently, and was recorded by the cellist ‘as a little present’ for his new wife. 

In his new EP played from the heart, Ferrández sets out ‘to bring listeners with me into these pictures of my life.’

Pablo Ferrández was born in 1991 Madrid and named after the great Spanish cellist, Pablo Casals. He released his debut solo album on Sony in 2021 to critical acclaim and has since recorded as a concerto partner with Anne-Sophie Mutter and won an Opus Klassik Award.