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Britten, Brahms, and Moser: Johannes Moser, cello and electric cello; Oksana Ezhokina, piano; Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle  1.2.2009 (BJ)


The opening work on this fascinating program, the sonata that Britten wrote for Rostropovich, was not merely performed–we were treated instead to what was essentially a lecture-recital. With a wonderful combination of seriousness, humor, and charm, the young German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser took the work to pieces, elucidating its structure and meaning with salutary clarity, and then put it together again, collaborating with the excellent Oksana Ezhokina in a performance that was masterly in every respect–and that many in the audience must surely have enjoyed much more than they might have done without the introduction.

Moser has everything a cellist needs in the way of both technical and artistic equipment. His two-handed pizzicatos in the second movement of the sonata offered only one example on the technical side–tone and intonation were also beyond cavil–and his expressive gift served the music with no less comprehensive understanding. At the other end of the program, Brahms’s Cello Sonata No. 1 received equally compelling advocacy. I was particularly impressed by the subtlety of the performers’ handling of tempo modification: they responded eloquently to the shifting expressive demands of the music, but without any crude signposting, so that I became aware that tempo had changed, without being able to put my figure on the exact moment when the change had happened.

My only regret about this passionate performance was that the piano lid was on the short stick. Much more so than with Britten’s spare keyboard textures, Brahms’s rich piano part needed the lid to be higher if Ms. Ezhokina’s playing was to achieve equal impact with Moser’s amply sonorous tone; Brahms, after all, was still writing what he called sonatas “for piano and cello,” and though no one would deny the cello’s lead role in many passages, a more even balance of power would have been beneficial.

Brahms was one of Britten’s unfavorite composers, so it was probably politic to separate their works by the interpolation of other music. As it happened, this was scarcely less enjoyable. Again, Moser’s lucid explanation helped no end in making his roughly 15-minute excursion on the electric cello approachable, but the sounds he (and the computer, and the hall’s loudspeaker system) made were in any case mightily attractive.

Electronic music has gone through a myriad of widely varying manifestations. Aside from the rare masterpiece, such as Maderna’s 1958 composition Continuo, it may be felt that “pure” electronic music’s impact on even the most open-minded listener has been fairly negligible. Around 1960, performers began to experiment in combining live performance with the simultaneous electronic modification of their playing. I remember attending a number of such performances in New York’s Town Hall in the early ’60s. But the musicians who gave them, enterprising though they were, lacked the sheer musical gifts to make the results any more than moderately interesting.

Johannes Moser is in a different class entirely. The delicacy of his ear and the power of his imagination match his technical fluency. There were one or two moments when he did with the music just what I thought he was going to do, but many more that were unpredictable, yet that at the same time, once heard, seemed inevitable. And the magical atmosphere that his composition/performance created went far beyond any such prosaic quality as “interesting.”

Bernard Jacobson


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