Recital by Sol Gabetta

Cello lover, what more could you want! When Sol Gabetta comes to the Stadthaus and her programme features the sonatas by Edvard Grieg and Sergei Rachmaninoff – two of the most beautiful Romantic cello works of all – a musical highlight is guaranteed. As an expert in Liszt and Ravel, Bertrand Chamayou possesses the nimble fingers and the delicate tonal palette required for the piano part in Rachmaninoff and Grieg. It is common knowledge that Rachmaninoff was a pianist of the century, but Grieg was also an excellent pianist who had studied at the leading conservatoire in Leipzig in the tradition of Schumann and Mendelssohn. This is also evident in Grieg’s music, which thrives not only on Norwegian folk melodies and inventive harmonies, but also on a technical mastery that was appreciated by Brahms just as much as by Tchaikovsky. These two such different spirits would probably also have been in agreement regarding Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata, for it too combines emotion and intellect, tradition and innovation. None of these works would have come into being without personal connections: Grieg dedicated his sonata to his brother, who had once wanted to become a cellist; Rachmaninoff dedicated his work to a cellist friend who was also his best man; and Benjamin Britten wrote all his cello compositions for Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten also recorded the piece with him, and their friendship is audible: in the grand ‘Elegia’ of the slow movement as well as in the playful dialogues of the fast movements, the first of which is, significantly, entitled ‘Dialogo’. How fortunate that Gabetta and Chamayou are such intimately close chamber music partners and cultivate the fine art of musical communication like few others. When the piano and cello then play the motifs back and forth, humour flashes through Grieg’s deeply emotional music, and Britten reveals a liberated joie de vivre rarely seen elsewhere.