Basile Ausländer and Jansen Ryser on the cover of their debut album
This coming Friday will see the release of a somewhat delayed debut album of two laureates of the Crescendo Young Swiss Artists. The performers are cellist Basile Ausländer and Jansen Ryser at the piano keyboard. Their “program” presents three sonatas for cellos and piano by composers that were trained in Paris during the first half of the last century. The first of these is Romanian George Enescu. The other two were French, both members of “Les Six,” Arthur Honegger and Francis Poulenc.
There is often a tendency for every new century to regard its predecessor as a distant past. Nevertheless, all three of these composers seem to have dodged that dismissal to at least a moderate extent. Closest to home, so to speak, is Enescu, whose string octet in C major was performed by musicians of the San Francisco Symphony, whose Chamber Music recital took place this past February 1. Similarly, violinist Agustin Hadelich made his debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP) as a soloist in the Shenson Great Artists & Ensemble Series this past March with a program that included Poulenc’s only sonata for violin and piano. Finally, Honegger’s 1920 sonatina (which he dedicated to Darius Milhaud) was performed at Mills College in October of 2020.
I must confess that I have had a soft spot for Les Six for some time. On the other hand, Enescu was given utterly terrible treatment by my high school music teacher (who clearly knew little more than what had appeared in the textbook he used). As a result, it took me quite some time to get to know not only that composer’s spirit but also the Romanian context in which that spirit had been cultivated. Nevertheless, in the “immediate present,” I found the performances by Ausländer and Ryser to be as refreshing as they were to the many “marks on paper” that they confronted.
Those (like myself) that feel that the last century still deserves some respect are likely to find the “program” that these performers prepared an engaging encounter.
