The big “what ifs” of music are mostly to do with loss. What if Mozart had not died young, Beethoven had kept his hearing, Chausson hadn’t ridden that bicycle into a wall? Occasionally a chance gain, if of a more isolated kind, grips our imagination. Had the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) not been medically unfit for military service in the first world war, one of the greatest modern works for solo cello, his Sonata Op 8, might never have been written.
Alban Gerhardt played this three-movement epic as part of a spirited launch event for Cello Unwrapped, the latest, ambitious year-long series of the kind Kings Place favours. With the main hall’s seating capacity only around 400, big concerto repertoire is out. Here is a chance, generously taken, to delve wider, deeper, more intimately. If your interest is to trace this most soulful instrument’s history, from coarse bass violin to poetic musical orator, you can: the programming of the year’s 45 concerts could hardly be more diverse, inside and outside the western tradition, embracing tango and electronics, Indian and mainstream classical. Instruction is only an add-on: concerts of musical coherence are the imperative. Bach is always there at the heart, his six unaccompanied suites a shapeshifting presence across the entire series (with the special draw of that ever great exponent David Watkin, exploring these work, and the art of continuo playing, across the weekend of 22-23 April).
One reason the choice of Kodály was so apt is its panoramic, sweeping view of the instrument’s capabilities. The sonata, written in 1915 but slow to become popular, encompasses a universe of sounds and styles. Baroque and folk traditions collide, not least in the “mistuning” – scordatura – of two strings, giving an earthy strangeness to the harmonies. Kodály revels in the sonic mimicking of zither, bagpipes and shepherd’s pipe, and draws on Hungarian funeral songs and military marches. Enormous spread chords and multiple trills, among other technical demands that send fingers and rosin flying, make it exhilarating, and surely exhausting, to perform.
Gerhardt plays an instrument by one of the great Venetian makers – a 1710 Goffriller – and matches rich tone with control and restraint. He grew up in a musical family: his mother a coloratura soprano, his father a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic, his brother a guitarist. All those influences, from the song-like lyricism to the silvered harmonics in the highest register and the extended plucked accompaniments – right hand bowing, left hand fingers making the melody and strumming the supporting chords – came together in a breathtaking performance.
This Berlin-born cellist had already been a generous soloist with Aurora Orchestra in Britten’s Cello Suite No 1 (Canto primo), Vivaldi’s Cello Concerto in B minor, RV 424 and, elegantly and lyrically, in Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations. Gerhardt’s wry smile and occasional asides, as well as his technical mastery, meant he was well prepared for that ultimate string player’s nightmare: a broken string. With barely a moment’s pause he swapped instruments with the Aurora’s principal cellist and continued to the end with aplomb. Aurora, conducted by Nicholas Collon, were impeccable accompanists, and caught fire in their own showpiece moments: Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite (1949 version). Both composers harness the past to the shocking and new in these compact, incisive works.
Cello Unwrapped’s second evening captured an entirely different mood. The French cellist Christophe Coin founded the Quatuor Mosaïques, a string quartet specialising in period performance. Coin uses little vibrato and plays without using an end pin, meaning the cello must be supported between the knees, an even more intimate relationship to the body than the usual dance-partner proximity of a modern cello (so brilliantly conveyed in that most celebrated of paintings of cellists, Madame Suggia by Augustus John). The resulting tone quality, helped by gut rather than steel strings, is firm and strong yet mysterious and elusive.
Opening with a ricercar by Domenico Gabrielli (1659-90), Coin played Bach’s Cello Suite No 2 in D minor and, switching from baroque bow to classical then Romantic, played unfamiliar short works – no doubt favourite fare for cellists but new to me – by Dall’Abaco, Romberg and Battanchon. As a majestic finale this imaginative player used a five-stringed piccolo cello for Bach’s Suite No 6 in D major. Paradoxically the work’s symphonic splendour and challenging double stoppings, which can sound rasping, especially in the two gavottes, took on fresh grandeur and expansive ease. Did Bach write the suite for this kind of instrument? No one knows for sure. Christophe Coin put an ardent case.
