Giora Feidman & Rastrelli Cello Quartett - Feidman Plays Beatles (2017)

The first bow wave of Beatles music reached Giora Feidman in 1964 while he was in the USA. And his feeling told him right away, there was something special about these guys, they would make it big. He couldn't have guessed how big, but "there was an incredible power in their music, and basically I was their fan from the beginning

Giora Feidman was 28 years old at the time, John Lennon 24 and Paul McCartney 22. "I've always played a bit of them myself, but never systematically. But actually it had been in the air for a long time that I would make a whole album with Beatles songs. So now it feels like a dream come true."

If one recalls that the LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, even before phenomena like Hair and Woodstock, became the musical manifesto of a worldwide movement of young people for an equally worldwide coexistence instead of war, discrimination and exploitation, it is not surprising that the creators of this album also inspired the tireless intercultural bridge-builder Giora Feidman

Together with the Rastrelli Cello Quartet, Feidman now brings selected Lennon / McCartney compositions to the level of chamber music, and this approach is by no means an impromptu one. As early as 1965, the Beatles themselves used a string quartet and merely supplemented it with an acoustic guitar - played sparingly, to boot. That was in Yesterday, and it became the most covered pop song of all time

"With today's listening experience, however, it is also very easy to understand how the Beatles first had to work their way from the simple beat band, of which there were thousands at the time, to the outstanding, innovative pop music ensemble," explains cellist and co-arranger Kira Kraftzoff, "When they recorded Eleonor Rigby in 1966, the strings actually played much too straightforward and hard to do justice to the song's empathetic, melancholy lyrics. And now Giora and we were also in the situation to work without the text. All the emotion Paul McCartney has packed into this song must now find expression through our instruments. And that's why we arranged the strings much softer than the Beatles did with George Henry Martin."

When it comes to making inwardness audible to the outside world, there is no more gifted musician on the clarinet than Giora Feidman.