Herzogenberg, Brahms, Bruch: Cello Sonatas

Sebastian Bertoncelj is a versatile soloist, chamber musician and pedagogue. Born in a musical family in Slovenia, he is strongly rooted in his nation’s artistic legacy and frequently shares his music and knowledge with audiences far behind its borders.

As a soloist he has collaborated with orchestras such as Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, RTV Ljubljana, Music academy of Ljubljana Symphonic and Chamber orchestra, HMDK Stuttgart symphony orchestra and Bled festival orchestra and conductors P. von Steinaecker, E. Shao, R. Baumann, S. Dvoršak, L. Voltolini, N. Firšt, Z. Bičanin on works by Tchaikovsky, Dvořàk, Rachmaninov, Kabalewsky, Shostakovich, Haydn, Bragato and Bloch.

In addition to this, he has performed concerts for Festival Ljubljana, Jeunesse musicale, Cellofest Ljubljana, Imago, Festival Bled) Festival Velenje, Kogojevi dnevi, Incontri Musicali Spoleto, Teatro Verdi Trieste, Lucca Classica, Nei suoni dei luoghi, Musica da camera Cividale, Teatro Luigi Bon, Badia Musica).

As a passionate chamber musician, Sebastian has collaborated with renowned musicians such as Anna Kandinskaya, Andrea Rucli, Christopher Tun Andersen, Emma Steele, Solenne Païdassi, Aylen Pritchin, Wonji Kim-Ozim, Emile Cantor, Mark Gothoni, Boštjan Lipovšek, Lorenzo Cossi, Luka Ljubas and late Klaus Maetzl. He frequently appears with Salzburg-based Accio piano trio.
After his studies at Ljubljana’s Conservatory and Academy of Music with Miloš Mlejnik, he broadened his education in Luzern and Salzburg with masters Christian Poltéra, Enrico Bronzi and Götz Teutsch. In 2025, he finished his soloist diploma „Konzertexamen“ at HMDK Stuttgart under Conradin Brotbek with distinction.

A sought-after teacher, he holds positions at Ljubljana and Maribor Conservatories of music, Celje Music high school, works as Assistant to the cello class of Ljubljana University, Academy of Music and regularely gives masterclasses to young and advanced cellists all over Europe.

Sebastiano Mesaglio
“Mesaglio plays with great freedom and fantasy yet logically joins the varied sections of every movement into a satisfying whole. His fleet passagework is pristine and pearly”. American Classical Record – Febbraio 2023
“A pianist who truly is a musician in the widest sense: he makes use of intellect, fantasy and sensibility achieving an admirable balance”  Luca Ciammarughi – Radio Classica
“Mesaglio has an ideal understanding of Beethoven’s writing, thanks to his sensitive, educated personality, and a stainless pianism which stands out in sound quality and immaculate technical expertise, as much as virtuoso and as lyricist” Alessio Screm – Messaggero Veneto

Born in Udine, Italy, in 1990, Sebastiano Mesaglio approaches the world of music at the age of four and since his childhood he has been a student of M° Giorgio Lovato, who had a decisive influence on his piano playing. He studied at his hometown Conservatory, graduating cum laude at the age of twenty. He took part in several competitions, often winning prizes like the Absolute 1st Prize at the “J. S. Bach” National Piano Competition in Sestri Levante when he was fourteen years old.

Winner of the Absolute 1st Prize also at the 2005 and 2010 editions of the National Piano Competition “J. S. Bach” in Sestri Levante, in 2016 he has been 1st Prize laureate both at the International Piano Competition “Città di Albenga” and at the National Piano Competition “Giulio Rospigliosi” in Lamporecchio. The following year he is one of the three finalists of the NYCA Worldwide Debut Auditions in New York, performing as a soloist with NYCA Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eduard Zilberkant. In 2019 he won the “Westby Prize” (Absolute 1st Prize) at the National Music Competition “Città di Piove di Sacco”.

Willing to improve his technique and his musical awareness, after his Conservatory diploma he obtains four more degrees: one in Piano and one in Fortepiano and Romantic Piano both at the International Piano Academy “Incontri col Maestro” in Imola with M° Stefano Fiuzzi, the “Diplôme Supérieur d’Enseignement” at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris “Alfred Cortot” with M° Bruno Rigutto and the Master in Piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln with M° Fabio Bidini.

Heinrich von Herzogenberg
(b Graz, 10 June 1843; d Wiesbaden, 9 Oct 1900). Austrian composer. The son of an Austrian court official, he received his education in the humanities at the Gymnasien in Feldkirch (Vorarlberg), Dresden and Graz. From 1862 to 1865 he studied law at the University of Vienna as well as composition at the conservatory with Felix Otto Dessoff, through whom his lifelong friendship with Brahms was formed. In 1868 Herzogenberg settled in Graz as a freelance composer, but moved to Leipzig in 1872. There he founded the Bach-Verein with Philipp Spitta and Alfred Volkland in 1874, and became its leader in 1875. In 1885 he succeeded Friedrich Kiel as professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where he also gave a masterclass in composition. After an absence from his teaching activities caused by ill-health, he lost his position at the Hochschule to Woldemar Bargiel in 1889. In 1891 he also gave up his masterclass, and he became a member of the Senate in 1892. After Bargiel's death in 1897 he took over his work at the Hochschule and the Akademie der Künste. Further illness forced him to retire in the spring of 1900.

Herzogenberg was one of the most distinguished composers from the circle of conservative Berlin academics. He had an all-round training, his musical activity being influenced by the various movements of the 19th century. A few of his early works, especially the dramatic cantata Columbus op.11, bear witness to his clash with Wagner, and his piano works and songs were initially influenced by Schumann, and later, increasingly, by Brahms, on whose chamber works he modelled his own. Herzogenberg's interest in earlier music, especially that of Bach, was principally nurtured by Spitta. It found its expression in his own Protestant church music, which Herzogenberg, though of Catholic upbringing, had emphasized in his output since 1893 when he came under the influence of the theologian Friedrich Spitta (1852–1924), Philipp's brother. The cantata Totenfeier op.80 stands at the transition to this period, the central focus of which is made up of the three church oratorios, Die Geburt Christi op.90, Die Passion op.93 and Erntefeier op.104. In 1868 Herzogenberg married Elisabeth (b Paris, 13 April 1847; d San Remo, 7 Jan 1892), daughter of Bodo Albrecht von Stockhausen (a diplomat of the Hanoverian Court); she was a pianist and a former pupil and close friend of Brahms.

Johannes Brahms: (b Hamburg, 7 May 1833; d Vienna, 3 April 1897). German composer. The successor to Beethoven and Schubert in the larger forms of chamber and orchestral music, to Schubert and Schumann in the miniature forms of piano pieces and songs, and to the Renaissance and Baroque polyphonists in choral music, Brahms creatively synthesized the practices of three centuries with folk and dance idioms and with the language of mid- and late 19th-century art music. His works of controlled passion, deemed reactionary and epigonal by some, progressive by others, became well accepted in his lifetime.

Max Bruch: (b Cologne, 6 Jan 1838; d Friedenau, Berlin, 2 Oct 1920). German composer. The son of a police official, Bruch received his first musical education from his mother, herself a singer. He began to compose from the age of nine; a Septet, written when he was 11, bears early hallmarks of his future style and assured scoring. At 14 he won the coveted Frankfurt Mozart-Stiftung Prize, which enabled him to study with Hiller, Reinecke and Ferdinand Breunung. His first substantial work was an opera based on Goethe’s Scherz, List und Rache, written and performed in Cologne in 1858 (no orchestrated version survives), after which his teachers encouraged him to travel throughout Germany. He went to Leipzig, a city whose musical life was still dominated by Mendelssohn’s influence, but settled in Mannheim between 1862 and 1864. There he wrote two works which would bring his name before the German public, the opera Die Loreley and the male-voice cantata Frithjof. The opera, based on the Rhine legend and to a libretto by Emanuel Geibel (Mendelssohn considered it shortly before his death), is most effective in the second act, in which the heroine enters into a pact with the river spirits. After a few successful performances in German and other European cities, brief revivals in Leipzig under the young Mahler (1887) and in Stuttgart under Pfitzner (1916), the opera disappeared from the repertory until stagings in Oberhausen (1984) and its British première in London (1986). Bruch wrote one further opera, Hermione (based on The Winter’s Tale), in 1870, but it had no success. Frithjof, however, was the first of many successful choral works which kept his name before the German public throughout his long life.

From 1865 to 1867 Bruch was music director to the court at Koblenz, and it was there that he wrote his first violin concerto, in G minor op.26, the work with which his name has always been associated (much to his distaste, for most of his other compositions were subsequently neglected). His friendships with such violinists as David, Joachim, Sarasate and Willy Hess, and the advice he received from them, inspired nine concerted works for that instrument, which ‘can sing a melody better than a piano, and melody is the soul of music’. The slow movement of op.26 is a fine example of Bruch’s ability to shape a melody. Between 1867 and 1870 he held a similar court post at Sondershausen and, after a freelance career as a composer until 1878, held conducting posts in Berlin (1878–80), Liverpool (1880–83) and Breslau (1883–90). He then directed a masterclass in composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin (1890–1911), where he died at the age of 82, honoured but lonely and somewhat neglected as a composer. His utter distaste for and outspoken criticism of the New German School of Wagner and Liszt isolated him more and more throughout his life. His reverence for the music of Mendelssohn and Schumann and his resistance to change meant that works written at the end of his life, such as the chamber music of 1918, sounded much the same as those compositions dating from 60 years earlier, although his ability to orchestrate almost equalled his melodic invention. He wrote three symphonies (1868, 1870, 1882), all of which contain good material. Bruch was respected as a teacher in his later years, with Respighi and Vaughan Williams among his pupils in his Berlin composition classes. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University in 1893.

Bruch loved folk music as a source of melody, and many of his works were derived from such countries as Scotland (Scottish Fantasy op.46, Das Feuerkreuz op.52), Sweden (Serenade on Swedish Melodies op.posth., Swedish Dances op.63) and Russia (Suite on Russian Folk Melodies op.79b). During his Berlin years he conducted the Sternscher Gesangverein, a choir from whose Jewish members he received material used in his three Hebrew songs, published in 1888, and Kol nidrei op.47. Both works were written in Liverpool, where he succeeded Sir Julius Benedict as conductor to the Philharmonic Society for three somewhat turbulent years. He was appointed on the strength of the successful performances he conducted there of his secular oratorios Odysseus op.41 in 1877 and Das Lied von der Glocke op.45 in 1879. These large works, together with Arminius op.43, Achilleus op.50 and Moses op.67, were often performed and well received throughout Germany, particularly during the 1870s when the country was unified under Bismarck and the subject matter appealed to prevailing nationalist sentiments. However their appeal in the British Isles and the USA (he conducted several American choral societies on a visit in 1883) was somewhat short-lived, largely because of poor translations and anti-German feeling at the outset of World War I; nevertheless several performances have occurred in more recent years. Max Bruch’s precocious gifts remained largely unfulfilled for two reasons. He was an exact contemporary of Brahms and was forced to exist in the shadow of his greater colleague even beyond the latter’s death over 20 years before his own, and the stubborn resistance he maintained to musical developments largely instigated by Wagner stifled any of his own originality. Nevertheless his name will endure, if only thanks to one superb violin concerto.