A Guitar at a Schubertiad

I must confess that I have had a fascination with the concept of the Schubertiad that reaches almost as far back as when I first undertook serious writing about the performance of music. (According to my records, the first time I expressed interest was in March of 2009.) The idea of chamber music being performed in a space that was more like a drawing room than even a modest-scale recital hall appealed to me. It seemed as if not only was this an opportunity for the listener to get closer to the music but also it was more conducive to the performers getting closer to each other.

Since that time I have been fascinated with how different performers try to capture intimacy for both the players and the listeners. Sometimes this involves “departing from the text,” not only with regard to the size of resources involved but also to what those resources are. From that point of view, I shall always remember February of 2013 as the month in which I first encountered the use of a guitar in the performance of chamber music by Franz Schubert.

The composition in question was the D. 821 sonata in A minor, written for pianoforte and arpeggione. The solo instrument for which the sonata was written was basically a hybrid of guitar and cello, closer to pre-Baroque viols in that it is both bowed and fretted. However, a viola student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music chose to play the solo part of this sonata with accompaniment provided by a guitarist. A little research on my part revealed that the Swedish guitar virtuoso Göran Söllscher had rearranged the piano accompaniment for D. 821 as guitar accompaniment. His version had the guitar accompanying a violin, but it could work just as well in accompanying a viola or a cello.

Pablo Márquez and Anja Lechner (photograph by Hubert Klotzeck, courtesy of ECM Records)

This brings me to my recent encounter with an ECM New Series album scheduled for release this coming Friday. The album features cellist Anja Lechner in a duo recital with guitarist Pablo Márquez. The album is entitled Die Nacht, taken from Schubert’s D. 534 song. Not only is Schubert the center of attention on the album; but also, the centerpiece of the Schubert selections is a cello-guitar performance of the D. 821 sonata. As usual, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this new album.

Intimacy is decidedly of the essence across all of the selections on this album. Indeed, Lechner plays the vocal line of five of Schubert’s songs; and I suspect I am not the only one who does not miss the words! As to the sonata, there have been any number of cellists that have made a showpiece out of it, often playing it with such energy as to register with listeners sitting up in some remote balcony of an enormous concert hall. Lechner is clearly more interested in quietude than vocal display, and it serves her reading of the sonata in the same way that she can communicate the spirit behind the Schubert songs without bringing the words themselves into the performance. This may mean that Márquez serves this recording primarily as an accompanist, but he does so with an understated rhetoric that one would not find in a piano accompaniment and is engagingly moving.

Interleaved among the Schubert selections are three nocturnes by his contemporary, Friedrich Burgmüller. While Burgmüller was, himself, a pianist, he wrote these explicitly for cello and guitar. As a result, they provide an orienting framework for the distinctive sonorities of this pairing; and the entire album both begins and ends with the first of these three nocturnes.

The overall result is an album that does a particularly effective job of capturing the social spirit behind the Schubertiad without compromising any of the underlying musical values of the selections being performed, and I would give anything to find just the right drawing room where I could listen to Lechner and Márquez present these selections in a recital setting!