Chamber
CHAMBER CHOICE
An irresistible showcase of Abel Selaocoe’s talents
Helen Wallace delights in the evocative and joyful music-making of the South African cellist and friends
Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae)
Works by JS Bach, GB Platti and Abel Selaocoe
Abel Selaocoe (cello, vocals) and guests incl. Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Elizabeth Kenny (theorbo)
Warner Classics 9029622433 55:18 mins
Since graduating in 2018 from the Royal Northern College of Music, following studies in his native South Africa, Abel Selaocoe has been hugely in-demand. Few cellists can boast playing at WOMAD, the London Jazz Festival and filling the Queen Elizabeth Hall. No wonder Yo-Yo Ma guests on one track: Selaocoe embodies Ma’s vision of a truly multicultural musical future.
Cellist, singer, composer and collaborator, Selaocoe inhabits a captivating sphere of spontaneous, mercurial creativity. Where is Home explores the African traditions and Western Baroque music that have shaped him. Most moving is the evocation of his mother singing a counter melody as he practised the Sarabande from Bach’s Suite No. 3. He draws these worlds together, again, in GB Platti’s Sonata No. 7, where movements are delivered with theorbo (Elizabeth Kenny), before dissolving into a cloud of celestial kora/cello melismas (Kadialy Kouyate).
Everything flows from Selaocoe’s own extraordinary voice
In Selaocoe’s hands the cello is a shape-shifter: in Zawose it’s a Tanzanian one-string ‘zeze’, high and airy; in Ka Bohaleng multi-phonic, virtuosic; in the tender Lerato it provides the percussive ‘beat on Bibles’, while Seipone offers a dazzling shuffle through his improvisational armoury. Song is the dominant form: everything flows from his own extraordinary voice, a soothing baritone that can plunge into unfathomable bass via Xhosastyle throat singing. His excellent collaborators here include members of Chesaba and Manchester Collective, Alice Zawadzki and pianist and producer Fred Thomas. It’s a fine taster menu: now I urge you to hear him live to experience his intoxicating charisma.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Bridge • Britten • Debussy • Janáček
Bridge: Cello Sonata; Britten: Cello Sonata; Debussy: Cello Sonata; Janáček: Pohádka
Truls Mørk (cello), Håvard Gimse (piano)
Alpha Classics ALPHA560 71:01 mins
Four of the 20th century’s greatest works for cello and piano: three of them famously recorded back in the 1960s by Rostropovich and Britten – a hard act to follow. Yet the Norwegian duo, Truls Mørk and Håvard Gimse, rise fully to the challenge in close yet lucid recorded sound that achieves an exemplary balance between cello and piano. Marginally less juicy of tone and idiosyncratic of phrasing than Rostropovich, Mørk brings a classical poise and eloquence to his phrasing and a marvellous sensitivity to detail, while Gimse is fully alive to the very different styles of piano writing in these four works.
The qualities of the new recording are especially favourable to Frank Bridge’s big two-movement Sonata – composed athwart the outbreak of the First World War, which horrified him – where the old recording suffered from slightly cloudy piano sound. As Mørk soars through the fraught lyricism of its first half, one hears clearly how Bridge subtly inflected even the most seemingly conventional piano figuration with his own individuality. And if the new recording of Debussy’s war-time Sonata is less dark and rhapsodic than the Rostropovich-Britten, it exemplifies the more enduring characteristics of French culture he sought to uphold.
The fugitive flights of melody and figuration comprising the three whimsical movements of Janáček’s Pohádka (Fairy Tales) demand a glancing, mercurial response which they certainly receive here, while the Britten Sonata somehow emerges as a weightier, more substantial work than in the original recording by its dedicatee and composer – special though that will always remain. Bayan Northcott
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Dvořák • Smetana
Dvořák: String Quartet No. 12 in F, ‘American’; Waltzes, Op. 54/1 & 4; Smetana: String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, ‘From My Life’
Wihan Quartet
Nimbus NI 6422 63:56 mins
The Wihan Quartet have held their position of eminence among the most distinguished Czech chamber groups for nearly 40 years. This remarkable consistency, in part a result of minimal personnel changes, is also down to the Wihan’s ability to revitalise their interpretative approach. Given their standing, it seems a missed opportunity not to champion less familiar repertoire – a string quartet by the late 19th-century composer Zdeněk Fibich, perhaps – alongside one or other of these dependable warhorses. Nevertheless, these performances of Dvořák and Smetana’s most famous quartets certainly offer something new.
Their performance of the first movement of Smetana’s autobiographical First Quartet is deeply satisfying, making the most of its drama without undermining its clarity of structure. The Polka second movement not only revels in Smetana’s celebration of dance, but in the cello interjections in the opening section provides genuine hilarity. Their reading of the Largo, while not the slowest on record, is one of the most heartfelt available and in the finale the high spirits of the opening are a perfect foil for the almost operatic depiction of the tragedy of sudden and total deafness that destroyed Smetana’s conducting career.
There is also a great deal to enjoy in their performance of Dvořák’s ‘American’ Quartet not least a thoughtful approach to the first movement which externalises its soulful qualities as much as its carefree exuberance. Throughout, their playing is both thoughtful and impassioned with only one uncharacteristic tuning blemish in the slow movement to disturb matters.
In a crowded field, these excellently recorded performances stand very high. Jan Smaczny
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Ravel
Berceuse sur le nom de Fauré; Violin Sonata in G; Tzigane; Sonata for Violin & Cello
Lina Tur Bonet (violin), Marco Testori (cello), Pierre Goy (piano)
Challenge Classics CC 72916 51:06 mins
This tribute to Ravel’s friend, the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange (her name here variously misspelt and mispunctuated), brings together four of his chamber works from the 1920s, when Pierre Boulez felt that ‘after the Trio [1914] you don’t find the same deep feeling as before, but more a kind of stylistic game, which is absolutely extraordinary’. Three of the elements in this game are bitonality, popular music and (pace Boulez) a somewhat refined form of lyricism, and not the least of the qualities of the players here is that they are adept in all three.
From Lina Tur Bonet’s sweetly elegant tone in the Berceuse sur le nom de Fauré you wouldn’t expect also to be startled by the jazz in the central movement of the Violin Sonata, or blown away by the Hungarian wildness in Tzigane. Especially striking in the former are the little deformations of the notated rhythm which any true jazz playing has to observe, with both violinist and pianist here egging each other on, while in Tzigane the violinist swoops and glides with superb abandon against the acid jangling of the luthéal.
So it is with reluctance that I have to mention occasional disregard for Ravel’s dynamic markings, notably the pianist’s for the pianissimo leading into letter B in the Berceuse. Strangest of all is a muddle at figure 3 in the first movement of the Violin Sonata, where the pianist seems bemused by the violinist’s quiet entry, so we’re given half a bar beyond what’s written. Roger Nichols
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Caroline Shaw
The Evergreen; Three Essays; And So; Blueprint; Other Song; Cant voi l’aube
Attacca Quartet
Nonesuch 75597913507 61:08 mins
Whether it’s the mystery of Finnish forests (Sibelius’s Tapiola) or the poignant beauty of English cherry blossom (featured in Butterworth’s setting of A Shropshire Lad), trees are well represented in music. American composer Caroline Shaw’s four-movement string quartet The Evergreen is an offering to a specimen recently admired on Galiano Island, off the west coast of Canada. Extended pizzicato passages are evocative of falling rain in ‘Water’; through gentle textural layering, ‘Root’ stretches and grows. Like her compatriot Jennifer Higdon, Shaw finds a broad timbral palette for strings – every rasp and flicker is embedded within a lyrical and melodic language.
Attacca Quartet – an ensemble that has previously recorded works by Shaw on 2019 album Orange – performs with accuracy and precision, unleashing itself in Three Essays, a translation of prose by Marilynne Robinson. ‘Nimrod’ (another beloved musical inspiration) juxtaposes the chaos and creativity of the biblical character; ‘Echo’ uses a call and response structure in reference to the self-perpetuating nature of social media. As a violinist, Shaw writes idiomatically for strings – the sparse themes in Blueprint are simple and exquisitely crafted. The composer is also a versatile singer (her vocals are sampled on Kanye West’s 2015 hit ‘Say You Will’) and features on three songs with the quartet here. And So unfolds into a duet between voice and plucked strings; Other Song is a version of a piece originally performed with Sō Percussion and Cant voi l’aube is a setting of a poem by 12th-century trouvère Gace Brûlé. Claire Jackson
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
JJ Walther
Scherzi da violino
Bojan Čičić (violin); The Illyria Consort
Delphian DCD34294 100:48 mins (2 discs)
Giovanni Giornovich to Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli, Bojan Čičić and The Illyria Consort have made a point of championing the under-sung. Now their attention shifts to Johann Jakob Walther – not to be confused with JS Bach’s cousin the lexicographer-composer Johann Gottfried Walther, but rather a virtuoso violinist from the previous generation. Ironically what little is known of him comes from his namesake’s Lexicon of 1732 where it transpires that Johann Jakob spent three years in Florence polishing his Italian credentials, led the court orchestra in Dresden and ended his days in Mainz. That he was dubbed the Paganini of his age during the 19th century speaks to the considerable technical challenges he embedded within two published collections of instrumental music; and it’s the first of these, the Scherzi da violino of 1676 that is here recorded in full for the first time.
The 12 scherzos are variously designated Suite, Sonata and Aria, while the tenth is an intricately-reasoned ‘Imitatione del cuccu’ whose insistent cuckoo-ing is stitched exuberantly into one of the highlights of a set never less than well-crafted if occasionally a touch workaday. Čičić makes light work of Walther’s virtuosic gauntlet, audaciously secure in the triple and quadruple stopping that punctuates passages drawing on elaborate bowing and left-hand techniques. And he enjoys a close rapport with his continuo of bass viol, theorbo and keyboards. The ‘phantasticus’ flights of fancy could sometimes sound a touch more fantastical perhaps, but Čičić’s clean, clearly-articulated playing reveals a composer who has languished in the shadow of Biber and Schmelzer for too long. Paul Riley
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
The Enescu Project
Enescu: Octet in C, Op. 7; plus works by Bartók, Fauré, Massenet, Pǎiş, Ravel, Ysaÿe
Nicolas Dautricourt (violin) et al; Capriccio Quartet
Orchid Classics ORC100202 78:54 mins
This lovingly conceived tribute to George Enescu and his Octet (1900) takes its starting point from the violinist Nicolas Dautricourt’s conviction that it ‘is one of the greatest masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire, or perhaps of music altogether.’ It’s hard to disagree about a score of such brilliance and mystery, one made all the more remarkable for being the work of a teenager (albeit a prodigy). The performance led by Dautricourt observes the opening movement’s ‘Très modéré’ marking more strictly than some, one reason perhaps why the music doesn’t quite soar, but the slow movement is serene and moving. This is collegial, congenial playing – true to the music’s spirit. From solo, duo and trio up to bigger ensembles, this programme puts Enescu in the context of his Romanian background and Parisian domicile. The opening Aubade (written a year before the Octet) is charmingly fresh, but though arrangements for strings of ubiquitous pieces by Massenet and Ravel make interesting biographical connections, they dilute the musical impact; something is lost in translation from the piano part of Fauré’s Élégie.
On the plus side, there’s the surging energy of a new Romanian octet, Mémoire Déformée, composed by George-Ioan Păiș (b1994) in tribute to Enescu – afragmented dance of edgy beauty. Ysaÿe’s compact Sonata No. 3, dedicated to Enescu, receives a concentrated performance from Dautricourt, who proves himself an eloquent player. He is joined by Cécile Agator for three of Bartók’s Duets, in searching accounts that evoke Enescu’s roots. John Allison
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Invisible Stream
Imbert: Akim’s Spirit; My Klezmer Dream; Musique aux Images etc; plus works by Coleman, Eisler, Schubert and Wagner
Raphaël Imbert (saxophone), Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello), Sonny Troupé (drums), Pierre-François Blanchard (piano)
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902343 58:47 mins
The Invisible Stream of the title is what jazz saxophonist and composer Raphaël Imbert calls the ‘unseen current’ between peoples, cultures, musical traditions and not least, as here demonstrated, those who improvise. And there is much slick improvisation in this line up of unequal parts jazz and classical, ranging compositions by Imbert alongside his own arrangements of Wagner, Schubert, Eisler and Ornette Coleman. It is an atmospheric and often beguiling mix, opening with Imbert’s own bittersweet Akim’s Spirit, and improvising from there on in pursuit of this ‘invisible stream’. Wagner’s ‘O du, mein holder Abendstern’ is touchingly played on Queyras’s ever-expressive cello, Blanchard shimmering beneath on piano, the whole segueing into a tender jazz resetting of Schubert’s An Die Musik working up into a major jazz ballad that in the telling is much less improbable than it might sound. Elsewhere the spare, quiet opening of Imbert’s Musique aux Images is gradually underpinned and driven by Troupé’s gathering drum march. Ornette Coleman’s Beauty is a Rare Thing precedes it, a rarer more angular kind of sparsity, whilst Imbert’s So Long, Radio Voice is all easy informality.
The conversations that Imbert and his fellow musicians start are engagingly carried through, the diverse influences merging and meandering, although the current for me only really starts flowing persuasively from the Wagner, as Queyras’s intimate cello segues into Blanchard’s poised piano. Sarah Urwin Jones
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Song
Works by JS Bach, Beethoven, Finnis, A Hamilton, Massenet, Messiaen, Stravinsky et al
Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello), Harry Baker (piano) et al
Decca 485 3169 73:21 mins
The golden, singing tone of Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s cello hits us the moment this dauntingly eclectic album begins – one, the note writer tells us, in which he is ‘seamlessly shifting from classical and jazz to folk and pop’. Seamlessly?
Listeners will surely spot when Bach gives way to the 1950s tearjerker ‘Cry Me a River’, or when the pop song Sheku wrote with singer/musician Zak Abel shatters the spell cast by Edmund Finnis’s subtle Preludes.
Even within individual items, not everything works as it should. Sister Isata’s faceless piano accompaniments don’t lift Beethoven’s Op. 66 Mozart variations, though the siblings are fine in two of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Sheku’s two Bach arrangements for four or five cellos tend toward the glutinous. But inbetween comes total balm: the slow, contemplative ‘Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus’ from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. In Sheku’s hands the cello’s ascent to its long-lingering final note is deeply affecting and magical, as beautiful in a different way as his opening rendition of the Irish folk song ‘Star of the County Down’.
By my reckoning, though, out of 21 tracks, less than half display Sheku’s gifts at their beguiling best. That is the price paid for muddying the waters with the inappropriate, lining up guest artists not at their best (sorry, soprano Pumeza Matshikiza), and ‘seamlessly shifting’ between genres too many times. Geoff Brown
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★
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