Not given to routine planning, Steven Isserlis comes up here with a
generous, characterful programme of early-Romantic masterworks—formerly
B-road stuff, these days anything but—offset by two suspendingly
beautiful song arrangements inimitably natural in their tessitura,
utterly painful in their introspective longing. There's a forgotten
little 6/8 Larghetto, too, by the dedicatee of Chopin’s Cello Sonata,
Auguste Franchomme (1808-84), published in Leipzig in 1838, during the
E-flat middle section of which Schubert, dead ten years, quietly dances
the ether.
Isserlis approaches both main works expansively,
getting his 1726 'Marquis de Corberon' Stradivarius to sing, project and
fade with beauty, form and expression foremost. More than once one is
struck by how paragraphs and episodes breathe, surge and cadence, rests
and silences given potent tension; this is finely articulate cultured
playing—ruminant poetry and reflective musicality, aristocratically
suspended climaxes, carrying the argument free of ego or 'produced'
theatre. Chopin's complex first movement, a ballade-like narrative
difficult to hold together, particularly impresses, amounting in
Isserlis's hands to perhaps the closest the composer ever got to
sustaining a prolonged symphonic dynamic. It compels at every turn of
its leisured fifteen-minute journey. Similarly one would not want to be
without the gloriously poised aria of the Largo. The early Polonaise
brillante goes with a Slavonic swagger, its imperial rhythms ideally
placed, neither rushed nor laboured. Good polonaise playing, like good
mazurka feeling, is an art not all have the key to.
In programme
order, out of Chopin's later (1845 and same key) ‘Nie ma czego trzeba’
comes Schubert's 1824 Arpeggione Sonata (for a now-defunct instrument),
unpublished until 1871, a bouquet of traceries and grace, its more
strenuous passages benefitting from the openness of the keyboard
writing. Repeatedly, Isserlis regales us, Schubert the Sonata man was
one like no other—fashioning canvasses as dependent on sighing Lied
contrasts and expanding caesuras as the pursuit of purely Beethovenian
dialectics. In these pages strasse tunes and sparing motifs go
hand-in-hand, uncontrived companions of the Biedermeier hour, lilting
and tilting their way through time. Isserlis's 'song without words'
Schubert is magical. And infinitely sad.
His booklet essay is
wisely expressive reading. Likewise his note on the editions used. Most
telling, in the Chopin Sonata, is his adoption of two autograph tempo
markings otherwise ignored: Maestoso rather than Allegro moderato for
the first movement, and Più lento for the Trio section of the Scherzo –
both bringing needed air and space to the music. Apparently small
changes, yet, as he says, 'these things make a difference…'.
Dénes
Várjon is a gracious partner, maybe not always at home in Chopin's
trickier figurations but otherwise agreeably in accord with Isserlis's
wider vision. He plays an 1851 Érard (Birmingham University Music
Department), tuned to A430. More opaque and less 'big' than expected
(compared with examples we've heard in Paris or Warsaw), the lyric mezzo
domain is where it speaks best, generating a warmly pedalled halo of
overtones and breathtaking die-aways (the end of the Arpeggione for one,
both song transcriptions for another). In denser, louder textures,
though, it loses clarity and attack, the engineered balance with
cello—picking up on an ambient acoustic prone to cloudiness— producing
occasionally muddied artefacts. (Classical Source)
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