TUE., AUGUST 28, 2007
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Cello, Nice To Meet You
by Justin Davidson
I’ll get flak from tuba players and piccolo virtuosos for saying this, but of all the orchestra’s marvelous menagerie of instruments, the cello seems to me the most human. To play it, you lean its head against your shoulder and curl yourself around its life-sized body. It can travel from the tectonic grumble of a low C up to whistling harmonics, but the center of its warm, pliable voice is a masculine, baritone range. Alone, it utters almost embarrassing intimacies; listening to the Bach Cello Suites can feel like eavesdropping on a therapy session. But it can project full-throated grandeur, too: The cello in Dvorak’s famous concerto is a large-scale public emoter, lobbing melodies into a vast concert hall and practically daring the populace not to be stirred.
The development of Western music has been told by pianists, fiddlers and conductors. You could erase all the cello sonatas and concertos from the catalogs of Beethoven, Brahms and Haydn, and their reputations would hardly suffer. But you could also pick a different path through history, an all-cello itinerary that would feel rich, varied and complete. In that alternate telling, Zoltán Kodály, would emerge as one of the great poets of solitude. His Sonata for Solo Cello begins with the sort of impassioned rhetoric that suggests an urgent group endeavor — a revolution, perhaps. He sets the ear up for trumpets and timpani, but none arrive. There is only the cello, roaring in the dark.
Kodály’s Lear-like cello is an orchestra of one, playing a half-hour piece of symphonic proportions. It dances, trembles, lapses into bleak meditations and beguiles the listener into perceiving illusory counterpoint, a mirage of reinforcements, a whole nonexistent philharmonic at its back. The sonata is a raving, one-sided conversation, unnerving but unutterably beautiful in its desire to conjure up company.
Many composers have found an inherent melancholy in the cello’s sonic colors. Elgar used its muted browns and half-lights in his ruminative concerto. Schubert added an extra cello to a standard string quartet to give his C-major Quintet an underpinning of poignancy, in the process creating one of the two or three pieces I would take with me into solitary confinement.
But nobody expressed that dolefulness more ravishingly than Brahms in the first of his two sonatas. You can hear the force of gravity in the instrument’s sound, a feeling that even as the melody climbs into higher registers it is constantly being tugged back down. The theme opens low, uses a little wriggle to nudge itself upwards, but then retreats into basso range with a tired sigh. After that first statement, Brahms begins the next phrase on a higher perch, and the tune opens up with a sense of wonder, as if it has climbed the scale and come to a spot with a very fine view.
If the cello concerto came into its own in the 20th century, it’s largely thanks to the phenomenal Russian-born performer and international activist Mistislav Rostropovich. Rostropovich chose his friends carefully, stuck to them with canine loyalty and reaped a crop of important music. Without him, Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Wijtold Lutoslawski might never have explored the abilities of such an antique piece of wood to express the rough intricacies of the industrial world.
It’s that innate personality that makes the cello such a perfect stand-in for the individual buffeted by modernity — or, in the case of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, by the relentless Soviet state. Whatever orchestral clangor or avant-garde insanity is being unleashed around it, the cello always sounds like a lively force, constantly reminding the listener that where there are people, there is music, and where there is music, there is humanity. It is no coincidence that when Sarajevo was being blasted by war in the '90s, the musician who braved shells and snipers to play music in the city’s streets was Vedran Smailovic, a cellist.
The development of Western music has been told by pianists, fiddlers and conductors. You could erase all the cello sonatas and concertos from the catalogs of Beethoven, Brahms and Haydn, and their reputations would hardly suffer. But you could also pick a different path through history, an all-cello itinerary that would feel rich, varied and complete. In that alternate telling, Zoltán Kodály, would emerge as one of the great poets of solitude. His Sonata for Solo Cello begins with the sort of impassioned rhetoric that suggests an urgent group endeavor — a revolution, perhaps. He sets the ear up for trumpets and timpani, but none arrive. There is only the cello, roaring in the dark.
Kodály’s Lear-like cello is an orchestra of one, playing a half-hour piece of symphonic proportions. It dances, trembles, lapses into bleak meditations and beguiles the listener into perceiving illusory counterpoint, a mirage of reinforcements, a whole nonexistent philharmonic at its back. The sonata is a raving, one-sided conversation, unnerving but unutterably beautiful in its desire to conjure up company.
Many composers have found an inherent melancholy in the cello’s sonic colors. Elgar used its muted browns and half-lights in his ruminative concerto. Schubert added an extra cello to a standard string quartet to give his C-major Quintet an underpinning of poignancy, in the process creating one of the two or three pieces I would take with me into solitary confinement.
But nobody expressed that dolefulness more ravishingly than Brahms in the first of his two sonatas. You can hear the force of gravity in the instrument’s sound, a feeling that even as the melody climbs into higher registers it is constantly being tugged back down. The theme opens low, uses a little wriggle to nudge itself upwards, but then retreats into basso range with a tired sigh. After that first statement, Brahms begins the next phrase on a higher perch, and the tune opens up with a sense of wonder, as if it has climbed the scale and come to a spot with a very fine view.
If the cello concerto came into its own in the 20th century, it’s largely thanks to the phenomenal Russian-born performer and international activist Mistislav Rostropovich. Rostropovich chose his friends carefully, stuck to them with canine loyalty and reaped a crop of important music. Without him, Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Wijtold Lutoslawski might never have explored the abilities of such an antique piece of wood to express the rough intricacies of the industrial world.
It’s that innate personality that makes the cello such a perfect stand-in for the individual buffeted by modernity — or, in the case of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, by the relentless Soviet state. Whatever orchestral clangor or avant-garde insanity is being unleashed around it, the cello always sounds like a lively force, constantly reminding the listener that where there are people, there is music, and where there is music, there is humanity. It is no coincidence that when Sarajevo was being blasted by war in the '90s, the musician who braved shells and snipers to play music in the city’s streets was Vedran Smailovic, a cellist.
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