July 2, 2009: Music history from the standpoint of a cello

The concert series for the InterHarmony International Music Festival at San Francisco State University began last night with a recital by its Director, the Russian cellist Misha Quint.  Taking the position that students attending this festival will be served as much by listening experiences as by technique classes, he compiled a program that stretched from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth.  Because of its family resemblance to so many bowed string instruments, little can be gained from trying to fix a date for the cello's "origin."  However, the earliest manual on the theory and practice of cello performance was published by Michel Corrette in 1741;  so the middle of the eighteenth century is a good place to begin a "historical journey."  That beginning was represented by a 1744 sonata by Pietro Locatelli.  Locatelli was a virtuoso violinist;  and, if we are to believe his Wikipedia entry, this was his only sonata for cello.  The composition makes technical demands that probably parallel the demands of his violin composition, set in the Galante style that provided a transition between the contrapuntal and harmonic richness of Johann Sebastian Bach and the "classical" expressiveness of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  (Several of Bach's sons, most notably Johann Christian, were proponents of this style.)  The style is very gestural, intervening between Bach's motivic approach and Mozart's richer melodic language;  and Quint demonstrated that a command of gesture provided the key to surmounting Locatelli's technical demands.

The Locatelli sonata was coupled, in the first half of the program, with Gabriel Fauré's 1880 C minor elegy (Opus 24) at the other end of the "historical journey."  We have progressed from Galante structures to the ternary form of short nineteenth-century compositions.  In Fauré's case the form was approached through relatively simple melodies set within a rich harmonic context.  The elegiac connotation suggests a highly emotional stance;  but Quint understood that, through "fidelity to the text," all emotion would rise from the music itself.  The contrast between Locatelli and Fauré thus makes for a sharp distinction, providing the festival students with a strong sense of how far music could progress over one-and-a-half centuries.

The second half of the program filled in the gap between these two extremes with two sharply different representatives of the early eighteenth century.  In this case the emphasis of virtuosity came from another violinist, Niccolò Paganini.  His 1807 set of variations (preceded by an adagio introduction) on the aria "Dal tuo stellato soglio," from Gioachino Rossini's Moses opera was composed for violin;  but, because the entire work is played on a single string, it is equally suitable for cello.  Paganini composed as one who had quickly mastered all of the technical demands set forth by Locatelli and was then driven to raise the bar as high as he could.  This set of variations is all fireworks (and all on that one string), using the violin to pave the way for the virtuosic extravagances that would later be the bread and butter of Franz Liszt's piano music.  Quint's performance was capable and calm, the still center in the eye of the hurricane, once again attending to a faithful execution through which the music would speak for itself.

Paganini was coupled with Schubert through one of the latter's best-known sonatas, usually performed on cello but written in 1824 (D. 821) for the arpeggione, described in its Wikipedia entry as "a six-stringed musical instrument, fretted and tuned like a guitar, but bowed like a cello."  This is a late work but not one from that remarkable final year of Schubert's life.  By way of historical context, 1824 is the year in which Schubert began work on his D minor D. 810 "Der Tod und das Mädchen" string quartet (which took him almost two years to complete);  and it is also the year of his C major ("Grand Duo") sonata for four hands at one piano (D. 812).  Schubert was clearly exploring the capabilities of the arpeggione;  but he was also cultivating that structural sophistication that makes his late works, particularly the extended ones, so interesting.  However, when Schubert goes to those "heavenly" lengths, the challenge for the performers is to make those durations endurable (so to speak).  Quint approached the work with a clear understanding of the whole, through which he could convey the sense that the music was always moving forward to its final goal.  The result was, again, as much a lesson in listening as an opportunity to enjoy a highly-skilled performance.

It is hard to imagine a cello's perspective of music history that does not include the most famous (notorious?) cello solo of the nineteenth century.  This is, of course, the depiction of the swan from Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals suite.  Quint saved this for his encore, leaving us with a sense of the cello at its most lyric.  If this recital is representative of the Faculty Chamber Music Concerts that will be coming up on Sunday afternoon and Tuesday evening, then the InterHarmony International Music Festival will be one of San Francisco's greatest assets for the month of July!