Creating a good recital programme for the concert hall but especially
CD can be a tricky business. The mix between the testing and
the familiar, the saleable and the unknown has to be just right.
This disc is a truly excellent recital; well planned, compellingly
performed and truthfully recorded. My main interest in requesting
the disc to review was the Ginastera Sonata Op.49 – a work I
had not previously heard but by a composer I find never less
than interesting. Good and very enjoyable as a work that it
proved to be, the revelation for me has been the Kabalevsky
Sonata in B flat Op.71.
This is a very much a United Nations disc: recorded in Italy
for an Austrian company by a Croatian cellist and Italian pianist
playing music by Lithuanian, Russian and Argentinean composers.
The names of cellist Jelena Očić and her pianist Federico
Lovato were previously unknown to me but they are both very
fine players indeed performing with a wide expressive range
and cast iron techniques. All of this music – with the exception
of the delightful song transcription ‘encore’ - need both physical
and intellectual muscle and it is on display here in abundance.
The least well-known composer here is Anatolijus Šenderovas.
Born in Lithuania in 1945 he has become part of the group of
famed Baltic composers including Arvo Pärt and Peteris Vasks.
But as so often these kind of groupings are made on geographical/political
rather than aesthetic/musical grounds because he is very much
his own man. They are an ideal curtain-raiser for this programme
because, although not insubstantial in themselves, they focus
on the more lyrical and expressive aspects of the cello’s personality
leaving the red-blooded drama to the sonatas to come. Šenderovas
takes as his point of departure the ‘Song of Songs’ from the
Old Testament with its theme of Immortal Love. This text has
inspired composers in the past notably Bantock’s extended setting
The Song of Songs and Vaughan Williams rapturous Flos
Campi. Although stylistically utterly different there is
a curious distant alliance between this work and the latter
work with the ecstatic voice of the cello here mirroring Vaughan
Williams’ solo viola. In this work the cello is the dominant
partner – very much the singer of the songs with the piano providing
accompaniments that seem to imitate the gentle strumming on
a guitar or, in the second song, a simple folk drum; here the
piano is ‘prepared’ one assumes with some strings damped by
the insertion of card or felt giving an effectively deadened
pitch – a simple but very effective idea. Throughout the disc
Očić and Lovato play with an easy spontaneity and
unanimity that reflects the fact that they are an established
duetting team. Without a doubt you might hear more tonally beautiful
cello playing than Očić but rarely more characterful.
I enjoy very much the way she is willing to sacrifice momentary
tonal sheen for the greater good of the ‘message’ of the music.
Hers is a resinous sinewy sound with power to spare. Both Očić
and Lovato are very strong on atmosphere; the opening to the
song starts with a hypnotic repetition of a single note which
the moves only at the point the cellist enters. Listen to the
gently thrumming piano accompaniment Lovato provides Očić’s
passionate musings – beautifully voiced and balanced; the piano
being both an accompanying guitar and a secondary voice singing
the song. Očić finds a wonderful range and variety
of tonal colouring. Again the word hypnotic springs to mind
– the obsessive fixating on little germ-like figurations giving
the music a powerfully rapt quality. This is music that – as
mentioned before – allows the cello to sing. Again and again
I find myself being drawn by the spontaneously natural quasi-vocal
phrasing of Očić. A wonderful opening to the disc
and a real ‘find’ in contemporary cello repertoire; a fascinating
fusion of modern and music with an ethnic tinge. The rather
brief liner makes no mention of the source of the thematic material
Šenderovas uses; I’m guessing it is all original but if so it
owes a debt of acknowledgement to North African sinuous melodic
shapes.
Following on from this beautiful work is the revelatory Kabalevsky
Sonata in B flat major Op.71. I’m sure cellist’s eye-brows in
their dozens will be raised by my previous ignorance of this
work but what a discovery it is. I have always enjoyed Kabalevsky’s
music but with the caveats that his work does toe the Soviet
party line more than some and he does not write music as deeply
personal and revelatory as others. However, this sonata dispels
that superficial generalisation. Written in 1962, it is exactly
contemporaneous with his own Requiem and Shostakovich’s
coruscating Symphony No.13 Babi Yar. There is a deeply
affecting confessional quality here that I find extremely moving.
The very opening – as the liner describes – begins in the depths
of the cello over a tolling piano figure, the tonality oscillating
from major to minor. Again Očić is superb at giving
a vocal quality to her phrasing. Although the music strives
to rise from the depths musically and emotionally it is impossible
not to feel a gravitational pull clawing at the music as it
tries to escape the oppressive weight of the opening material.
There is a muted, nostalgic lost quality to the music here that
both players are able to project magnificently. Lovato produces
superbly gentle filigree work that floats insubstantially around
the cello like the ghost of memories past. Suddenly, about half
way into the extended first movement [track 3, 5:20] the tolling
bells become quicker and more insistent and we are into a passage
of more a typically mechanistic Soviet paranoid nightmare. I
wonder if here Lovato could have provided more emphatically
crude chords for Očić to assail – but that is a tiny
detail. After less than three minutes of vainly trying to ‘escape’
the opening of the movement there is in effect a cello cadenza
which sinks back to depths followed by a piano solo, again hovering
between major and minor, trying to sing a consoling simple song
which the cello takes up, the repeating piano figure now high
in the registration, and about to fade into silence before one
last angry gesture of defiance brings the movement to an abrupt
end.
The ghostly atmosphere pervades the central Allegretto con
moto even more. Simple chilled phrases from the two players
answer each other before they join to play this extraordinary
spectral waltz. Played loud by a full orchestra this would be
a happy go lucky Masquerade-esque waltz. Here, thinly
harmonised, played with a winnowed away tone it is disconcertingly
unsettling. There is a gentle malice at work here – ghostly
dancers from an earlier time – it really is a remarkable passage.
Quite without the ‘dance and be damned’ spirit that Shostakovich
might write but somehow all the more disconcerting for that.
Again Očić and Lovato capture the fleeting insubstantial
quality of the music superbly. Listen to the way Očić
allows her vibrato to intensify over the top of a waltz phrase
and fade away as she descends – it adds to the smiling neurosis
of the music. The piano is blander (deliberately so), his accompaniment
being more dutiful, more correct – but the simplicity of the
piano part and the understated way it is played here allows
the cello to have a canvas and not a competitor on which the
drama can develop. Yet this is a drama performed in sepia; again
not the garish primary colours of Soviet realism. There are
deep emotions being explored here yet barely acknowledged. The
waltz returns and the movement ends almost inconsequentially.
There is none of the rage or nightmarish quality we expect from
Shostakovich in one of his Scherzos. Kabalevsky comes
closer in the opening of the final Allegro molto – exactly
the kind of scurrying solo part over pounding piano that features
in so many similar Soviet works. Here’s a case in point where
Očić’s tone is harsher and edgier than some illustrious
rivals yet to my ear this sounds right for the underlying mood
of the music; there are frantic and desperate things happening
here. Perhaps the piano could have been a fraction more equal
status in the balance here. For two minutes this hurtles along
before the piano reins in the tempo and the cello takes the
opportunity to sing a wide-ranging song of protest. A climactic
high point – literally - is reached and as the cellist falls
away from it in a kind of exhausted collapse, the toccata-like
opening tempo resumes. But this time the dynamic is hushed and
sinister like rats scurrying around some disused torture chamber.
The original assertive dynamic soon reappears and then, and
quite extraordinarily this mood evaporates and over another
low tolling piano note the work’s Coda is reached. The cello
seems to be striving for a redemptive sunlight, crawling up
through the dark aided by a repeating piano cadential figure
that is resolutely both tonal and in a major key. Has the composer
found or is asking for forgiveness? It is an extraordinary musical
coup de théâtre, the final hushed cello pizzicato notes
fading to nothing. Given that Kabalevsky – allegedly – managed
to have his name removed from the original infamous Zhdanov
decree of 1948 which blighted the careers and lives of so many
of his contemporaries by virtue of his Party connections this
work has a sense of mea culpa that I had not heard in
any of his other works. That is pure speculation and fancy on
my behalf but it is by some distance the most profound Kabalevsky
I have heard and a work of a movingly personal nature. Aided,
at the risk of repetition, by a performance of total commitment
and personal conviction – a major achievement by these artists.
Not that the Ginastera Sonata that follows is a minor
work. It is one of a spate of cello works inspired by his marriage
to cellist Aurora Natola. A late work, written in 1979, it distils
the essence of Argentinean folk music into something altogether
more abstracted than his popular works like Estancia and
Panambi. Yet it retains the use of muscular motor rhythms
and pounding piano figurations that typify so much of his work.
Again both Očić and Lovato are wholly committed to
the style of playing the music demands – physical power and
dynamic extremes are the order of the day. As with much of his
writing for strings Ginastera seems to care little about how
hard he makes the parts he writes – cruel double-stopping and
exposed high-lying passage work are the norm. Also, both parts
play almost continuously in teeth-gritted opposition. Even when
the superficial energy of a movement subsides the mood remains
tense and uneasy. The central pair of movements are powerfully
contrasted, the second movement Adagio passionato giving
both players opportunities to muse at length in extended solos.
The third movement Presto mormoroso is another of those
strange nocturnal scherzi in which Ginastera seems to delight.
This is not haunted in the way Kabalevsky might write – there
are natural forces at work here but they are mysterious and
unfamiliar all the same. It is a superb tour de force of
atmospheric writing that these players toss off with insouciant
ease. The final Allegro con fuoco is much more like the
spectacular toccata movements Ginastera wrote as finales to
his Piano Sonatas 1 and 2. Musically he has moved on but they
share a common heritage. Again he makes aggressively unreasonable
demands of the cello in particular and I love the way Očić
attacks the music as though her very existence depended on it.
Not the stuff of a Classic FM “All the Mogadon Moments You’ll
Ever Need” Album for sure but viscerally exciting. With one
last dismissive gesture the work ends. Certainly a work for
those who know they enjoy Ginastera – all the fingerprints of
his later works are here. If not as compelling for me here that
is simply because the emotional journey of the Kabalevsky was
more personal, more insecure and ultimately more touching in
its desperation.
The disc is completed with another simple stroke of programming
genius; a beautiful transcription of an early Ginastera song.
An ideal lyrically stunning conclusion to the disc. Again Očić’s
phrasing is so soulful, so naturally expressive that you can’t
help but think that she must also sing – and rather well at
that. Lovato is so subtly understated in his accompaniment he
provides the perfect foil to the more overtly emotional Očić.
Looking through the catalogue I see that both of the main works
are available on other discs. The Ginastera as part of a Naxos
survey of the complete Ginastera chamber cello works, and the
Kabalevsky variously coupled with other twentieth century sonatas.
By definition this particular coupling is unique. As I hope
I have made clear I think this is a superb disc in every respect
particularly the programme planning and hyper-sensitive response
to the music from both performers. The recording is good without
being absolutely first rank but in no sense does it detract
from the great pleasure I had listening to this disc repeatedly.
Documentation is modest – Očić contributes the liner-note
but it is not as insightful as some performers notes prove to
be. If a good disc can be judged by its ability to change one’s
assessment of a piece or composer then this is such a disc –
I have always enjoyed Kabalevsky’s music but until now I do
not think I was aware of the depth of some of his oeuvre.
Nick Barnard
Jelena Očić (cello); Federico Lovato (piano) 
