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First Unitarian Church
July 3, 2016
The nineteenth century was the Age of Transcription. In an era when one might get the opportunity to hear a Beethoven symphony perhaps once or twice in a lifetime and in which most middle-class houses possessed a piano (and the owners some ability to play it) there was clearly a market for arrangements of the great classics for domestic forces.
Unfortunately, this does not explain Robert Schumann's decision to add a piano accompaniment to Bach's Cello Suites (only the third has survived, thanks to cellist Julius Goltermann, who made a copy; Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim destroyed he manuscripts of all six sometime after 1860). Certainly, the cello part is unmodified, making it as much of a technical challenge as Bach's original. Schumann's intention, therefore, cannot have been to make the music more accessible to less-than-virtuoso cellists.
Perhaps he believed that the music — which today has something of a reputation for fearsome intellectuality and in Schumann's time was virtually unknown — would be more accessible in the other modern sense, that adding a piano would make the music more approachable to listeners of his era.
If so, then perhaps he was not completely in error, pointless though the exercise may seem to modern ears.
In introducing the performance, cellist Zuill Bailey pointed out that Schumann's arrangements were made shortly before he entered the asylum where, two years later, he was to die. Bailey manfully resisted making the obvious jokes about Schumann's state of mind and I shall attempt to do likewise.
But what of the music?
The accompaniment is mostly chordal — which immediately makes it sound inauthentic, as Bach would surely have made it more contrapuntal. In the dance movements, the piano held off until the repeat, although whether this was Schumann or the performers I am not sure (a chance remark made by Bailey shortly before they began playing led me to suspect the latter). This was certainly a good idea, although it did serve to reinforce my feeling that the piano part, although played as well as it could be by Lorraine Min, was decidedly de trop. The chordal nature of the accompaniment in the Allemande also managed to make it sound more like Handel than Bach — and, trust me, to my mind that is no improvement.
Despite the superb playing from both musicians, I could not help but feel that Schumann had wasted some of the little time he had remaining to him.
Am I grateful to have had the chance to hear this? Of course. Would I want to hear it again? Need I say?
In the first half of the concert Bailey, who is not just an outstanding musician, but also a very personable and illuminating speaker, gave us the first two cello suites, unadorned.
The prelude to the first suite immediately revealed a player possessed of a rich tone and tremendous innate musicality. His rubato was at times quite dramatic, but never sounded less than natural. The allemande was inner-focused and flowing, the courante spirited and extravert, the sarabande concentrated with big, almost Romantic, dynamic contrasts. If the first minuet was, frankly, too quick for dancing, the gorgeous minor-key second minuet, which almost whispered, was simply exquisite. And the final gigue was exuberant, but with a deliciously delicate close.
The second suite revealed the same qualities in Bailey's playing, but this time he interspersed the movements with commentary, something I would normally have found quite objectionable (interrupting Bach, for heaven's sake) yet, once again, Bailey's remarks were brief, to the point, never less than interesting and frequently amusing, as when he described his rebuttal of those who told him that he couldn't play the sarabande in Romantic fashion "with such emotion": "tell me again how many children Bach had", he responds.
To close the concert proper, we had two short pieces for cello and piano, a delicious melody by Gluck and, of course, Saint-Saëns' The Swan, played with a sumptuous opulence by both Bailey and Min, although I confess that I might have enjoyed it even more had somebody seated near me not felt the need to hum along with the melody quite audibly.
As a richly-deserved encore, we had Gregor Piatigorsky's highly effective arrangement of Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp min, Op. posth. The dictionary does not contain enough superlatives to describe this performance, during which the audience sat in absolute silence, as well they might.
A truly wonderful close to an excellent season.
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