Two things strike one immediately: the
exceptionally up-front and raw recording quality with its
admixture of echo and the frequently violent and resinous
attack of cellist Tatjana Vassilieva. It makes for very
tiring listening. I’d be tempted to blame much of this on
the studio set-up were it not for the fact that she seems
consistently to favour outsize and personality-rich attacks,
ones that will cause your blood pressure to rise with immediate
effect in the Kodaly. She takes a broadly measured view
of the Adagio though the outer movements are pretty much
up to tempo. Tonally her palette is not as wide as it could
be and her gutsy bowing takes a bit of getting used to –
I wish for instance that she’d been rhythmically tauter
in the opening movement and had shaped her phrases to more
immediately arresting effect, as Starker did in his classic
EMI recording of 1957. More overt in the slow movement and
with cavernous gestures and tone – with dynamics to match
– she tends to rely more on bow weight than bow colour.
There’s some ambient noise hereabouts and there seems to
be something wrong with the master tape in my copy at about
0.35 into this movement.
The Cassadó
Suite is receiving a pleasing number of recordings these
days – Jamie Walton has recently set down his version on
Somm for instance – and its vivacity certainly repays questing
cellists. Gutsy and volatile Vassilieva couldn’t be more
different from Walton – he’s very much more equable temperamentally,
his tonal resources are deployed with a certain degree of
reticence; if Walton wields elegant Sheffield steel she,
by contrast, drives through the Suite with an electric carver.
I find her kind of playing remorseless with too much bow
pressure and rather hysterical approach, treating the Intermezzo
and Danza finale as a quasi lamento for instance. Still,
to others it may certainly be different – and exciting,
if they can cope with the recording, which places her under
your chin.
It’s good to
hear the Ysaÿe and Tchérepnine; the former confirms to her
playing elsewhere and could have done with a dose of restraint
and the latter, seldom recorded, seems to suit her very
much better. Whether the Japanese cast of this work encourages
her to explore more lyric playing it has paid dividends
in the inner movements. I still recoil from her bowing in
the opening movement however.
In the circumstances,
whilst I admire the commitment and vivacity and also the
adventurousness of some of the programming, I can’t really
recommend the disc – too intense, not enough light and shade,
vicious bowing attacks and a ruinous acoustic.
Jonathan Woolf
Tatjana Vassilieva (cello)
