ALKAN: Sonate de Concert, Op. 47; LISZT: Premier Elegie; Deuxieme Elegie; Romance oubliee for Cello and Piano; La lugubre gondole; Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth – Emmanuelle Bertrand, cello/Pascal Amoyal, piano
Harmonia mundi Gold HMG 501758, 65:59 ****:
Recorded 11-14 March 2001, this darkly compelling cello album features, along with the major piece by Alkan, very late works of Franz Liszt, which the composer himself arranged for cello and piano, this contributing in some small way to his modest chamber music output. The First Elegy, with its brief but supple burst in melody, was composed in 1874 as a “lullaby in the grave” for Countess Nesselrode. The Second Elegy (1877) bears a dedication to Lina Ramann, a music journalist. The “forgotten romance” resets a lyric piece from 1843. So, too, Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth finds its basis in a chivalric Rhineland legend that Liszt had set as a song in the mid 1840’s. The Sad Gondola (Troisieme Elegie), perhaps among Liszt’s most starkly modernist pieces, anticipates the death of Richard Wagner in Venice in 1883. The music conveys a melancholy, harmonically ambiguous universe, an anticipation of the lachymose poetry of Yeats and Eliot.
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) most commonly raises associations of brilliant, often exaggerated salon-piano virtuosity, the likes of which have compelled pianists like Raymond Lewenthal, John Ogden, and Ronald Smith. Alkan’s friendship–like that of Chopin–with cellist Auguste Franchomme (1808-1884), however, produced the 1856 Grand Sonata, which had its premier the next year. The Sonate enjoys big proportions, an eminently symphonic work in a chamber music medium. Both the cello part and the piano part require masterful virtuosity, rife with double-stops, triple-stops, huge runs and leaps, and a range of expressive colors from the various registers of both instruments. A tinge of Cesar Franck (or Faure) informs the vast, energetic scope of the first movement, a sonata-form whose development falls into nine distinct sections. The piano part becomes quite feverish, and the general affect seems a cross between Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and the Franck Piano Quintet.
The second movement Allegrettino has a rocking theme, a kind of A-flat barcarolle in an increasingly dolorous, intricate mood. The Adagio bears a quotation from Micah (V, 7) about “dew from the Lord,” setting the tone for an other-worldly, pre-Debussy or Lisztian moment of transparency and parlando meditation. The blissful, transcendental effect has the color of the cello’s song against the diaphanous ostinati of the piano, the whole intensified to a rare point of light. The last movement, a demoniac saltarello, Prestissimo, challenges the performers’ notions of playability, dervishly alluding to Beethoven’s Kreutzer once more. The cascades proceed in manic figures, with the piano having to play ostinato for 300 bars or so – the sound reminiscent of equally acrobatic moments in Gottschalk or Saint-Saens.
— Gary Lemco
