Aside from his popular Violin Concerto no. 1, “Kol Nidrei” numbers among Max Bruch’s most famous compositions. The melancholy “Adagio after Hebrew melodies” was written in 1880 for the cellist Robert Hausmann. It treats two old Jewish songs whose extraordinary beauty proved deeply moving to the Protestant Bruch, by his own admission. The tenor cello sound is the ideal medium for the voice of a Jewish cantor, and thus to this day “Kol Nidrei” offers every cellist a wonderful opportunity to make the instrument “sing”. In this text, based on the first edition of 1881, “Kol Nidrei” appears for the first time in an Urtext edition substantiated by scholarly research, for which not just the musical sources, but also numerous letters and documents from the Max Bruch Archive were consulted. Christian Poltéra was able to be procured for the markings in the solo part.
G. Henle Publishers stands for Urtext sheet music of the highest quality. The Urtext editions not only provide the undistorted and authoritative musical text but are also aesthetically pleasing, optimised for practical use and extremely durable. And then there is the strong, distinctive blue profile: (almost) all of the Urtext editions are bound in the characteristic blue cardboard.
Musicians trust Henle's blue Urtext editions because they:
- provide an undistorted, reliable and authoritative musical text
- offer superb, aesthetically appealing music engraving
- are optimised for practical use (page turns, fingerings)
- are of high quality and durable (cover, paper, binding)
- contain a short preface that introduces the work (particularly useful for AMEB exams) in German, English and French, as well as explanatory footnotes for particularly interesting passages in the score
- contain a description of the sources, an evaluation of the sources, readings and a documentation of the corrections made (= "Critical Report") in German and English, and often also in French
