Bloch & Bruch HyperionCDA 67910 ****

Natalie Clein believes Ernest Bloch to have been "deeply affected by the early 20th-century yearning for a sense of identity and nostalgia for an imagined past", and sees the Jewish character of his music in the context of his statement that "I am not an archeologist. It is rather the Hebrew spirit that interests me, the complex, ardent, agitated soul that vibrates for me in the Bible." She brings that complexity of perspective to bear on the famous rhapsody Schelomo, and she treats it with a narrative freedom that serves her well, too, in the not-quite- as-tightly knit Voice in the Wilderness and, with Christopher Palmer's unfussy orchestration (for cello, strings and harp), in From Jewish Life (originally for cello and piano). But her most sheerly beautiful playing is found in the smoother world of Bruch's Kol Nidrei. url.ie/4qdb