Cello repertoire: the MMS collection

Posted by Paul Wood on 26th Aug 2026

Since leaving the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland I've spent most of my working life teaching, pupils of every age and standard, and a great many concertos and concert showpieces have crossed the music stand along the way. Very few of those pupils ever performed any of it with an orchestra.

That has always bothered me. As a conductor I've looked for ways to put a young player out in front as a soloist, and in community work the answer has almost always been a string orchestra. It might be a few friends getting together for an afternoon. It might be a school group, a community orchestra, or a professional band. The practical difference is the point: fewer players to find, fewer fees to cover, and no waiting for a full symphony orchestra to have a gap in its diary.

We have more ways of making that happen now than we used to. What tends to be missing is the music. The piano reduction is easy enough to find. The same piece arranged properly for strings, with a solo part that hasn't been quietly simplified to make the arrangement work, is another matter.

That's what this catalogue is for. Just over eighty cello titles now, and here's how it breaks down.

Concertos, reduced to strings

This is the largest group and the reason most people arrive here. Every one of these works from the composer's own orchestral score, with the solo part left exactly as written. What changes is underneath: the wind and brass material gets redistributed through the string parts rather than dropped, so the harmony and the counterpoint survive the reduction. The soloist's job doesn't change at all.

The Dvořák B minor is the headline, 35 minutes and everything a concerto can ask of you, and it has its own post along with the Rondo and Silent Woods. Saint-Saëns's First is the other one people come for: a single continuous span rather than three separate movements, which makes it a very different proposition to programme and a slightly frightening one to memorise.

Behind those two sits the repertoire that actually gets played more often. Goltermann's concertos are the obvious example. He was a cellist himself, working in Frankfurt, and he wrote music that lies under the hand in a way that music by non-cellists frequently doesn't. The Third, Op. 51, is the one for a player with real technique to spare. The First, Op. 14, sits lower and is the more sensible first full concerto.

Popper's Concerto No. 1, Op. 8, is worth more attention than it gets. Popper was the great cello virtuoso of his generation, principal in Vienna and later teaching in Budapest, and he's remembered now almost entirely for his studies. The concerto is proper music, not an exercise wearing a hat.

Then the eighteenth century. Bréval's Second in D and Romberg's First are both standards of the teaching repertoire and both benefit enormously from a real string band instead of a piano, because the accompaniment was conceived that way in the first place. Klengel's Concertino No. 1 in C is the gentlest way into concerto form here. Klengel taught Feuermann and Piatigorsky in Leipzig and knew exactly what a developing player can and can't do.

Two more worth naming. Haydn's C major was lost for the best part of two centuries until a set of parts turned up in Prague in 1961, and it's the concerto that has sold more copies here than any other cello title. And Vivaldi's G minor for two cellos, RV 531, which solves a specific problem nobody else solves: what two good cellists play together.

Salon pieces, songs and borrowed music

The second group is where the catalogue gets more interesting, and where you're more likely to find something you haven't already played.

Most nineteenth-century cello music was written for cello and piano because that's what a drawing room contained. Move it to strings and the character changes completely. A held string chord doesn't decay the way a piano chord does, so a long cello line stops fighting for space and starts floating on top of something. Fauré's Élégie is the clearest case. So is his Après un rêve, which began life as a song and was never meant to be accompanied by a keyboard's dying resonance in the first place.

Tchaikovsky knew this. The Nocturne Op. 19 No. 4 started as a solo piano piece and he re-scored it himself for cello and orchestra, which tells you what he thought it wanted. The Pezzo capriccioso he wrote for cello and orchestra from the start.

Some of this group isn't cello music at all, and that's the point. Rachmaninoff's Vocalise was written for soprano. Fauré's Berceuse Op. 16 is a violin piece. Kreisler's Schön Rosmarin is a violin piece. Purcell's Dido's Lament is an aria. All of them sit beautifully on the cello, and none of them are going to appear on your syllabus, which makes them useful when you want a short second item that isn't the same short second item everyone else brings.

If you want display rather than lyricism, this is also where the showpieces live. Popper's Hungarian Rhapsody Op. 68 is the most reliably effective of them, followed by his Polonaise de concert Op. 14 and the Elfentanz. Squire's Tarantella Op. 23 does the same job from the English side. Squire was a fine player and among the first cellists to record seriously, and the Tarantella is unashamedly written to finish a recital.

Bloch's From Jewish Life is the opposite kind of piece and one of the strongest things in the catalogue: three short movements, Prayer, Supplication and Jewish Song, that ask for tone and phrasing rather than agility. It belongs next to Kol Nidrei, which has its own post along with Bruch's other late cello works.

One practical point. Five of these exist here in both scorings, cello with piano and cello with string orchestra, from the same edition: Bréval's Second Concerto, Klengel's Concertino, Goltermann's Alla polacca Op. 48 No. 4, Moór's Largo Op. 105 and Vecsey's Valse triste. Learn it with piano, perform it with strings, same page turns, same fingerings, no relearning. Moór is worth a look while you're there. Barely a name now, though Casals played his music.

Music for cellos alone

The third group needs no conductor, no violins and nobody else's diary. Four cellists in a room is a real ensemble, and cello quartet is one of the few textures where the instrument gets to do everything at once: melody, inner parts and bass, all in the same colour.

Goltermann's Religioso and Nocturne Op. 53 is the best-selling cello quartet here by a distance, and it's easy to hear why. He writes for four cellos the way a cellist would. Satie's Gnossienne No. 1 transfers unexpectedly well, the harmony being static enough that four sustained cello lines suit it better than a piano does. Elgar's Salut d'amour and Fauré's Pie Jesu are the two you'd programme if you needed something that works on anybody.

Beyond the quartets there's Grell's Larghetto and Telemann's Concerto in D, both for four cellos, and Ole Bull's The Herdgirl's Sunday for eight. Marie's La Cinquantaine appears twice, once for solo cello with cello quartet and once with string orchestra, so a cello section can perform it alone or with the rest of the strings.

If you have a section of four or more and no repertoire for them, this is the part of the catalogue to start with.

The editions

Everything here is professionally engraved and sold as an instant PDF download with the full score and every part. No performance licence is required and permission to record is included, which matters if you intend to put a performance online.

Twenty to start with, five from each part of the catalogue, no composer twice.

Five concertos

Five concert pieces

Five lyrical pieces and transcriptions

Five for cellos alone

That's twenty pieces by twenty composers, and it leaves roughly sixty titles unmentioned. Everything else is under cello and string orchestra and cello and piano, or the full cello catalogue if you'd rather browse the lot.

Concertos, reduced to strings

Salon pieces, songs and borrowed music

Music for cellos alone

The editions

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