MiV Home
Alix Goolden Performance Hall
August 9, 2006
Dmitri Shostakovich's Cello Sonata - seemingly one of the few Soviet-era works for cello that was not composed for Mstislav Rostropovich - was composed in 1934, a troubled period for him personally as well as for his country.
Shostakovich was about to clash for the first time with the Soviet Union's ruling ideology ("Whatever Stalin says is correct") over his opera Lady Macbeth and subsequently to withdraw his fourth symphony from rehearsal (it was finally premiered in January 1962).
Moreover, Shostakovich's marriage was in deep trouble; he had fallen for another woman, Elena Konstatinovskaya. After a holiday in which the composer wrote to Elena every day, his wife Nina insisted on a separation. She continued to Leningrad, leaving him in Moscow, where he began work on the sonata.
Few, if any, composers could prevent this turbulence from affecting their music and Shostakovich's Cello Sonata is undoubtedly a troubled work.
It was also the major work in Paul Marleyn's and Cary Chow's superb recital on Wednesday evening. From the fluent opening statement to the abrupt conclusion - Shostakovich offers no false hope or easy answers - neither player put a foot wrong in a performance which beguiled the ears as much as it engaged the emotions.
Emotionally, as so often with Shostakovich, the heart of the piece was the slow movement, another exercise in the Lyricism of Desolation - of which he was master and virtual creator. Here Marleyn and Chow built inexorably to an intense climax before the final, bleak close and the hypervirtuosic, sardonic finale.
The remainder of the programme was somewhat easier listening, opening with Marleyn's own arrangement of an (the?) Adagio by Benedetto Marcello; the slow, solemn piano chords underpinning Marleyn's noble cello line.
Chan Ka Nin's Soulmate for solo cello seemed considerably shorter than the seven minutes Marleyn told us it would last. I am happy to attribute this equally to Nin's music and Marleyn's playing. The music itself eschews almost completely double- and triple-stopping - I detected one, at the very close - and thus constitutes all the more a balancing act for the composer, one which he manages with aplomb - as did Marleyn.
Marleyn was also the arranger of Tchaikovsky's famous Andante Cantabile, originally the slow movement of the first string quartet. The combination of Marleyn's excellent arrangement and the delicious playing of both musicians belied the music's origins for four strings.
Rodion Shchedrin's In the Style of Albeniz was exactly that, all Iberian flamboyance played with some superbly subtle (and not-so-subtle) rubato.
Schumann's Adagio and Allegro was unmistakably from his pen and received a reading of passion and spontaneity.
But the real, unexpected gem was Ottorino Respighi's Adagio con Variazione. For those whose chief familiarity with this composer is either his colourful (some would say garish) tone poems, such as The Pines of Rome, or his arrangement of Rossini miniatures, this came as a big surprise. It features a yearning theme and a number of wonderfully inventive - and technically very, very difficult - variations.
All of which was, as with everything else, played with feeling, style and enormous technique.
A superb evening.
MiV HomeLast modified: Thu Aug 10 19:37:27 PDT 2006