By Megan Long Westberg | From the May/June 2026 issue of Strings
Blackbird song is rich and varied, each singer capable of leaping from a resonant mezzo to a textured and elastic soprano. Despite its inclination to nest near the ground and eat things that live beneath it, when it’s time to sing, a blackbird seeks a more elevated public forum: treetops, rooftops, utility poles. From there, its warbling melody of love or territorial conquest reaches the farthest. A blackbird’s musical relationship with time and tempo is flexible. It sings in the morning. It sings in the evening.
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You know what’s coming next.
As “Blackbird,” written by Paul McCartney and included on the Beatles’ 1968 eponymous release (better known as the White Album) intones, it will also sometimes sing in the dead of night. McCartney’s blackbird was symbolic, the song itself an offering of hope and encouragement inspired by the US civil rights movement. Today, the ballad’s quiet splendor and the decade of its birth have together become an integral part of a recent recording by cellist Nicolas Altstaedt: Blackbirds—Music from the 1960s.
Despite this reference and the inclusion of “Blackbird” on the album, Blackbirds is not a collection of popular music from the ’60s arranged for cello. You will find no Sam Cooke or Rolling Stones covers here. In fact, accompanying the Beatles hit—in an atmospheric arrangement for Altstaedt and French lutenist Thomas Dunford—is repertoire that could be described as both classical and (mostly) rather obscure: Grażyna Bacewicz’s Cello Concerto No. 2 (1963); Morton Feldman’s Durations II for Cello and Piano (1960); Benjamin Britten’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 65 (1961); and Sándor Veress’ Sonata for Solo Cello (1967).
Unexpected perhaps, but it is not the only element of surprise to be found here—the album did not, for example, begin its life as a collection of pieces written in the 1960s. “I didn’t think of it as a concept album,” writes Altstaedt. “There were puzzle pieces that came together.” And the first piece of the puzzle was not “Blackbird.” This album began with the Bacewicz Cello Concerto. And that it began with the Bacewicz Cello Concerto is, at least in part, due to Witold Lutosławski.
“I grew up in a small town, in Gütersloh, where [German composer] Hans Werner Henze was born,” says Altstaedt. “Thanks to him and the promoter Klaus Klein, there were days of new music every year, where I met György Ligeti, Wolfgang Rihm, Aribert Reimann, and Hans Werner Henze in person, and encountered the music of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Feldman. I turned pages, listened to Ligeti talking about his piano études, and heard many first performances.” These experiences proved formative for Altstaedt. “New music was a common thing. Thanks to these influences, I could say that music of the post-war time was something that formed my childhood—it was vital and existential for me.”
Steeped as he was in the music of the 20th century, Altstaedt’s repertoire choices leaned in that direction early on. Which led to Lutosławski. “The cello concerto that I have performed the most in my entire life—before I learned the Haydn and Schumann concerti—is the Lutosławski Cello Concerto,” says Altstaedt. “I could call it my favorite piece to perform. I have performed it in every single audition and competition. It shaped my cello playing and persona; it is the piece I would play in any condition at any time and was the first cello concerto I performed by heart naturally.”
Lutosławski’s piece is both innovative and spirited, a conversation between soloist and orchestra that feels . . . heated. The cellist in this concerto is not a hero that steps forward to be supported by the larger group—this is a hero very much on his own, downright antagonized by the others (brass—I’m looking at you) until he eventually prevails about 20 minutes later. There are moments of strange, shimmering beauty and lengthy blasts of absolute chaos as soloist and orchestral voices intertwine, working both with and against one another. The composer, known for drawing on folk influences, 12-tone serialism, and atonality, employed another of his calling cards here: a kind of controlled improvisation that lends to its energy. It is bold, it is modern, it is interesting.
And it was Altstaedt’s fondness for this piece that led him to another Polish composer, Bacewicz. “Coming across Grażyna Bacewicz’s Cello Concerto was like meeting another mother tongue,” says Altstaedt. “It is written before Lutosławski’s masterpiece and speaks a different dialect. Bacewicz’s second concerto was written in 1963. You can hear the major influence on Lutosławski’s concerto from 1970: the instrumentation, the use of percussion, the intertwining of solo part and orchestra, the ending(!). But it is so much more.
“[In the Bacewicz], there is no aleatoric composing; there is flirting with dodecaphony, though you can’t detect it immediately, as the lyrical expression is so much in the foreground. The second movement is very close to Ligeti’s writing—Klangfarbenmelodie, also in the tradition of Webern.” Klangfarbenmelodie is a concept first posited by Arnold Schoenberg wherein tone color is considered a melodic element. “The last movement,” he says, “reminds me at the beginning of Kurt Weill or Hanns Eisler, but it always proves to be music on its own.”
Bacewicz’s concerto has been slow to catch on (its US premiere was in 2020), which is mystifying if you spend any time listening to it. It is full of intrigue, mystery, danger. Bursts of action are followed by periods of waiting, ruminating, until it’s time to dash forward again. The music’s underlying sense of menace burnishes its overall energy and radiance. In it, you can hear a thriller unfolding in black and white.
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Curiously, Altstaedt has yet to record the Lutosławski Cello Concerto, but he was insistent that he get the Bacewicz on disc. He had the support of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, which performs under the baton of Maxim Emelyanychev on this album, and found that audiences, when presented with the work, love it. Its obscurity, in his experience, isn’t an audience problem.
“Promoting good music makes you sometimes encounter bizarre situations,” he explains. “With an orchestral invitation, there often comes the request: ‘Because of the funding and the pressure of the PR department, could you please play a piece by a female composer?’ When I enthusiastically reply: ‘Yes, I would love to play Bacewicz’s second cello concerto, a masterpiece!’ I often get back: ‘Ah, that’s a bit tricky; let’s actually do the Dvořák or Elgar concerto.’
“I hope that this recording will be a step forward to get this thinking out of the way.”
The next puzzle piece arrived in the form of a suggestion by Emelyanychev, a pianist as well as conductor. “When I begged Maxim to do this recording,” says Altstaedt, “his first reply was, ‘Yes, but it would be nice to do something else, too, in chamber music.’ [There is] nothing more I could have wished, as Maxim is one of the most admired musicians and personalities whom I love to make music with. We just had played the Britten sonata in Japan, and this was our favorite choice.”
Lutosławski’s concerto, Altstaedt’s found-ational piece, was written for Mstislav Rostropovich—so was Britten’s Sonata, Op. 65. Having met him at a performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in London, Britten wrote this, his first piece for the cello in general and the first of five written specifically for Rostropovich. It is a technically demanding work for both musicians, opening with a spirited Dialogo before stepping into a Scherzo that taxes the cellist’s pizzicato skills. Triple- and quadruple-stops, high harmonics, rhythmic and tonal ambiguity . . . Britten wove virtuoso challenges into five movements that are at turns emphatic and mournful, playful, sharp-tongued, dreamy.
The composer and cellist recorded this work for Decca in 1961, and Altstaedt has no desire to compete. “I have to say that the Rostropovich/Britten recording of this piece is a milestone and will remain unmatched,” he says. “Britten’s piano playing and musicianship are otherworldly, and it is so interesting what kind of influence a musical partner can have on someone. Britten gets out the best in Rostropovich; I think Rostropovich’s playing (also in the recording with Britten of Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok) is here at his most refined and noblest.”
It was only once Altstaedt added the Britten to his recording lineup that he made the decision to include only music written in the 1960s. And a chance discovery added a little spontaneity to the proceedings. The night before he and Emelyanychev were set to record the Britten (on Easter Sunday—the only day either of them had free for months), Altstaedt discovered Morton Feldman’s Durations II. Feldman (1926–87) was a New Yorker and close friend of John Cage’s whose music defies easy description. Slow. Quiet. Simultaneously magnetic and perplexing. “Feldman represents for me in music what Rothko does in painting and has fascinated me since my early childhood,” says Altstaedt.
In Durations II, the performers can choose the duration of each note within the tempo, yielding a kind of contained freedom. Altstaedt and Emelyanychev decided to give it a go in the studio, after recording the Britten. “We played through four times, each time very differently, improvising with agogics, different voicing, resonances, until a garden party outside the studio stopped any further ambitions.
“I am someone who loves recording, trying out everything I can imagine, to experiment and dig deeper into the music. The beautiful thing about this piece is that it is uneditable. Each performance has different combinations of sounds and resonances. The fourth take became the final one, and I like to have a memory of a live recording on this CD.”
The only piece for solo cello on Blackbirds is by Sándor Veress, one of Altstaedt’s favorite composers. According to the cellist, Veress, just like Bacewicz, is “another composer who can’t be defined with any descriptions and who plays between atonality, folk music, and dodecaphony.”
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He goes on.
“He is original in every piece—you could say even close to Joseph Haydn in spirit and therefore one of the great composers of all time.”
Altstaedt has played a number of Veress’ other pieces, including his Musica concertante, Four Transylvanian Dances, String Trio (which he recorded with violist Lawrence Power and violinist Vilde Frang nearly a decade ago), and other chamber pieces. And his immersion in Veress’ oeuvre has served his efforts well. While working on his Passacaglia Concertante with Heinz Holliger, the composer’s student, Altstaedt learned a little something about the solo sonata that made its way into his thoughtful, full-throated performance. “In the slow movement of the sonata, there is a mordent,” he says, “that has until now only been played and interpreted as a sort of trill. But what Veress meant was [for it to be] basically a large vibrato that Sándor Végh, in the orchestral pieces, asked to be done with the nail of the left hand for the best audibility.”
To Altstaedt, the works by Veress and Bacewicz on this album represent two puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly. “The solo sonata was on my to-do list for a long time, and this is an evident coupling for me. Both works (Bacewicz, in 1963, and Veress, in 1967) are so close in spirit and time,” he says.
Which brings us to the final piece—and back to the Beatles. (“What are the ’60s without the Beatles?” Altstaedt quips.) Two months after recording with Emelyanychev, Altstaedt found himself performing with lutenist Dunford in Portugal, where they performed “Blackbird,” a song with “the quality of a Schubert song that will remain an eternal voice forever,” according to Altstaedt.
“‘Blackbird’ has been a part of our recitals ever since,” he adds. “I knew it was not the cherry on the cake, but the binding thread of this CD. We recorded it at midnight, after our recital, in two takes, and I love the fact we caught the atmosphere of the midnight bells and the barking dog on those takes.”
Altstaedt and Dunford’s “Blackbird” is an altogether different creature than McCartney’s jauntier manifestation. Absent any metronomic foot tapping, instruments and voices blend into one another—one stepping forward, one dropping back—rolling in resonant swells, then resolving to quiet, then out into space. Into the dead of night.
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So taken was he with the way this piece tied the album together, Altstaedt had at first intended to call the album Blackbird but was told licensing made this impossible. A suggestion from his partner led to a one-consonant addition, which felt right to the cellist. “It seemed the right title for a disc,” he says, “where every composer and their very own and distinct voice reach out for freedom.”
What Nicolas Altstaedt Plays
Cello Guadagnini, Piacenza, 1749
Bows I have several bows from the 19th century (Eury, Lupot, Peccatte, Pajeot), but the one I play the most has no certificate yet . . . I love my swan head Dodd from 1795 as a classical bow and a Luis Emilio Rodriguez Carrington as a Baroque bow.
Strings 2014 Larsen Originals, Magnacore, and Il Cannone
Case Accord, with five bow holders (thanks to the small-size Guadagnini)
Rosin Always trying out new ones; I’ve used dark Melos and the dark Larsen as well as Igor Laubach
—NA
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