I’ve tried repeatedly to make headway with Khachaturian’s
Cello Concerto and Concerto-Rhapsody but to no avail. This is decidedly
not the fault of the estimable cellist Marina Tarasova – a star of the
Miaskovsky Cello discography – nor of conductor Veronika Dudarova, nor
of the perfectly serviceable Moscow orchestra or indeed the recording.
Acknowledging the fault may be mine I have to say I emerged battered
by Khachaturian’s insistence and spurious grandiloquence. Dating from
1946 the Cello Concerto was the first major post-War work written by
the then Deputy Chairman of the Composers’ Union and first performed
by two of the greatest figures in Soviet musical life, cellist Sviatoslav
Knushevitsky and conductor Alexander Gauk in Moscow, in October of that
year. From its Technicolor opening and musing cello figures through
its Armenian folk trappings and woodwind melismas I found the writing
choppy and discursive and insufficiently cohesive but Tarasova does
play with admirable engagement and commitment, vesting her solo line
with a keening eloquence, well equalized throughout the scale from percussive
bass through to the lean focused top of her compass. She varies her
tone as well in some of the more fractious passages of the work with
expert musicality and there is certainly plenty of orchestral incident
to titillate the ear – from the violent orchestral attacks to the very
sinuous and insinuating woodwind writing and plenty of technical and
expressive demands to be made on the soloist, not least in the extended
first movement cadenza. This is musing, keening and replete with difficulty
but there is a fatal lack of distinction as the orchestra theatrically
embarks on new fractious episodes at 16’02. The rather menacing slow
movement is certainly, as the notes suggest, oriental and melismatic
but I’m afraid I failed to hear the "desperation" I’m told
I should hear – and this implied analogue to Shostakovich, though he’s
not referred to in the notes, seems to me profoundly misplaced. There
are elements of persuasive lyricism here it’s true but again ones that
ultimately lacked formal coherence. There is certainly an insistence
bordering on obsession in the finale with its emotive cello and use
of material from the first movement but the conclusion seems to me colossally
and overwhelmingly assertive in a sense that reveals limitations rather
than emphasising strengths.
The Concerto-Rhapsody was written for and premiered
by one of the younger generation of cellists, Mstislav Rostropovich
(premiered at the Royal Festival Hall with the LSO under George Hurst).
It is a formally odd work with an abrupt insistent cello cadenza, plenty
of momentum – much of it illusory – and "incident." Intriguingly
Khachaturian then reverses the roles, with the orchestra spinning the
lyric line and the cello harmonising around it. There are some Armenian
dance sections in the Allegro Animato but to be frank this is, if anything,
a considerably less interesting and engaging work than the Cello Concerto,
tending as it does to the vapid and utilising colour and orchestral
bluster as a means by which to occlude poverty of thematic material.
I wasn’t convinced by either work but the advocacy of the performers
is admirable and deserving of the highest merit.
Jonathan Woolf
Marina Tarasova, cello