Slava’s Cello Show

From the Classical Vault Dept.: While poring through old pieces to post here, I play a game with myself: What did I venture out to review 20 (or 25 or 30) years ago? In this case, it’s 35 years, and it was a recital by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. I’d seen him about a decade before then, a recital at the University of Connecticut where he played the Prokofiev Cello Sonata, among other works, and it was just a dazzling as the concert I describe below.

                                                                                     

THERE IS A QUALITY characterizing a virtuoso performer that goes beyond elements of tone and technique. It’s been likened to a kind of sorcery; it certainly inspires awe. This is the quality cellist Mstislav Rostropovich brought to Proctor’s Theatre in his Monday evening recital.

Pianist Lambert Orkis was an equal participant in the success, a partner where too often you only find an accompanist. And the program was dominated, until the very end, by the musical personality of Brahms.

Mstislav Rostropovich and Lambert Orkis

Opening with an arrangement of the adagio from an oboe concerto by Alessandro Marcello, Rostropovich came right out of the gate with a tone control that proved his arms and fingers were conduits of a remarkable singing voice.

The piece did not call for much piano assistance but Orkis came into his own with the three pieces in folk-style by Robert Schumann. Forming a mini-sonata of contrasting mood, the first was jaunty and whimsical, the second more lyrical, the third a grandiose conclusion.

They set the stage quite romantically for Brahms’s Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major, which concluded the first half. This is a piece that demands the attention of only the most thoughtful players and players whose personalities won’t get lost in the sweep of the work.

Highlighting the sonata itself was the jewel of a second movement, opening with an eight-note pizzicato figure that underlies a most plaintive theme. One of the most compelling moments in the cello literature is the return of that pizzicato motive, a moment that only succeeds in a performance of complete sincerity. Rostropovich and Orkis were as passionate as they were sincere.

The Influence of Brahms lingered over the beginning of the second half; certainly Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” takes much of the former’s pathos and translates it into Russian. It was performed at a leisurely pace but with a firm sense of intensity.

The final work on the program, Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D minor, begins with deceptive simplicity but a series of trademark chords announces the unique personality of the man who served for several years as the cellist’s mentor.

Even as Rostropovich proved again his superb affinity for the music of his native Russia, he also reminded us that his is the best tessitura in the business. A Shostakovich scherzo often, as in this piece, is a tunefully macabre little dance and the performers made the most of the humor of it. And the Largo that followed was an unexpected contrast: pretty and affecting without the cries of pain that often emerge when Shostakovich goes slow.

The fast finale brought out the composer’s (and performers’) impishness as well as pulling out all the stops as far as virtuoso playing is concerned.

There is an attitude the virtuoso transmits that transcends occasional missed notes. Some of Rostropovich’s more frantic passages were not always right on target but there was a larger conception of the music at work that didn’t allow the problems to interfere.

An enthusiastic audience of just under a thousand got two encores in return for its ovations: the Andante from Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata and David Popper’s furious Dance of the Elves.

– Schenectady Gazette, 16 April 1986