March 19, 2009: New cello music from two centuries

Student recitals at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music are particularly interesting when they provide opportunities to hear music that is seldom (if ever) performed in more conventional concert settings.  This was one of the key differentiating features of the Graduate Soprano Recital that I reviewed at the beginning of this month;  and last night's Graduate Cello Recital provided two further opportunities.  However, while the soprano recital featured the 2004 work of a composer living here in San Francisco, both of the composers represented by the cello recital were deceased.  One of them, Benjamin Britten, is well-known for a wide variety of compositions;  but the four chamber works for cello that he composed for Mstislav Rostropovich between 1961 and 1971 have received relatively little attention.  The other is the Bohemian cellist David Popper (1843–1913) who may be best known today as the teacher Adolf Schiffer, who, in turn, taught Janos Starker.

Popper's Opus 66 "Requiem" (originally composed in 1892 for three cellos and orchestra) opened the Conservatory recital with piano accompaniment.  (Where, other than a conservatory, are you likely to find three cellists together in a single piece of chamber music?)  I have to confess that I am a sucker for the sound of multiple low instruments playing in close harmony.  At the beginning of this year, I used my blog to let loose an encomium for Ludwig van Beethoven's three equale for four trombones (WoO 30);  and Popper's "Requiem" begins with similar haunting sonorities.  However, the close harmonies gradually unfold into a more elaborate contrapuntal texture around a motif that was probably extracted from Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" (D. 839, the third of his Ellens Gesänge on texts from Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake poem).  Whether or not this connotation was intentional (Scott's text has little to do with the Latin prayer, which, in turn, is not part of the requiem ritual), the result was a deeply moving composition for an unconventional ensemble that deserves to be heard more often.

Britten was represented by his first (Opus 72, 1964) solo cello suite, the second of his "Rostropovich" chamber music compositions.  This work may receive low exposure on the assumption that audiences may find it "difficult;"  but I side with Arnold Schoenberg's precept that music is only "difficult" for the listener when it is "badly played."  From a structural point of view, Britten draws on several devices familiar from his earlier compositions.  We have a recurring "Canto," similar to the incantation that constitutes the "spinal cord" of his Opus 18 (1939) Illuminations song cycle.  We also have an overall structure following his even earlier (1937) Opus 10 "Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge," where each movement is based on a traditional form (Fuga, Lamento, Serenata, Marcia, Bordone, Moto perpetuo).  Then, from a more rhetorical point of view, we have Britten's general fondness for the sounds of harmonics from strings lightly touched at a nodal point.  Lastly, the folding together of the Moto perpetuo with a concluding statement of the "Canto" reflects the final emergence of the theme in the midst of a "moto perpetuo style" fugue in the Opus 34 (1946) "Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell" ("The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," perhaps Britten's most familiar composition).  The themes and sonorities of the cello suite may differ radically from these precedents, but there is no shortage of familiar landmarks to guide the ear into this new territory.  Fortunately, this particular student had no problems with those landmarks;  and I cannot imagine anyone accusing this performance of being "badly played."  If we had more performances like this one, we might have more opportunities to hear this composition.

There is also the risk that too much attention to the unfamiliar results in neglecting the familiar.  There was certainly no such neglect in the performance of Johannes Brahms' first (Opus 38, completed in 1865) cello sonata in E minor.  Similarly, there was an ensemble performance of the first movement of Schubert's C major (D. 956) string quintet (two cellos, rather than two violas), in which all the lyric qualities of the first cello part shone through, but always in impeccable balance with the other four voices.  This student is equally comfortable in both nineteenth and twentieth centuries;  and, given the level of understanding brought to the Britten performance, we can look forward to a similar comfort level with the current century!