Gautier Capuçon and Jean-Yves Thibaudet (from their event page on the San Francisco Symphony Web site)
Last night’s Great Performers Series concert in Davies Symphony Hall, presented under the auspices of the San Francisco Symphony, offered a duo recital bringing cellist Gautier Capuçon together with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The program consisted of three sonatas composed over the span of half a century and occupying the beginning, middle, and end of that period. Each of those sonatas was composed in a different country.
The program opened with the latest of the works, Claude Debussy’s D minor sonata, composed in 1915, near the end of his life, in Paris. This was coupled with the earliest of the pieces, Johannes Brahms’ Opus 38 sonata in E minor, composed in 1865, not long after he had decided to make Vienna is base of operations. The intermission was then followed by Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 sonata in G minor, composed in 1901 in Russia not long after his first major success with his Opus 18 (second) piano concerto in C minor.
Rachmaninoff made it clear that he had composed a duo sonata, in which the piano provided more than mere accompaniment. (Rachmaninoff himself played the piano part when the sonata was first performed; how could things have been otherwise?) However, one can make just as clear a case that the role of the piano is far from secondary in both of the other sonatas on the program. It therefore seemed more than appropriate that each of these “sonatas for cello” should be performed by two musicians, each of who was a virtuoso soloist in his own right.
As a result, what made last night’s program particularly interesting was how each of the sonatas took its own approach to establishing the music as a “dialog of equals.” After all, both Brahms and Debussy were as skilled in their keyboard work as Rachmaninoff was. In Debussy’s case, however, his capacities had been severely weakened by illness during the final year’s of his life. As a result, when the piano part is at its most expressive, it almost seems as if Debussy was looking back somewhat poignantly at the technical skills that were now beyond his physical grasp.
The music, on the other hand, is anything but melancholic. If anything, the prevailing rhetoric is one of sharp-edged irony. One might almost sense Debussy recognizing, near the end of his life, that he was no longer the rebellious “young Turk” that he used to be. Remember, Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” was given its first performance in 1912. If Debussy never heard this music, it is highly unlikely that he failed to hear about it and its unconventional approaches to both vocal work and the composition of the chamber ensemble. Not long after that premiere, Debussy would assist Igor Stravinsky in presenting an initial four-hand account of the music for “The Rite of Spring” to Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky.
The 1915 cello sonata was the first of a planned series of six sonatas, each with different instrumentation. (Debussy died after having completed only three of them.) It was clear that Debussy wanted to get beyond any past connotations associated with “sonata form.” The prevailing rhetoric is richly conversational, consisting more of playful exchanges and occasional outbursts, rather than straightforward declarations. With a bit of a stretch of the imagination, one could liken Debussy’s approach to the style of dialog that would later emerge in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Both Capuçon and Thibaudet had no trouble treating the eccentric approach to exchange as if it were the most natural thing in the world, making their interpretation of Debussy a foreshadowing of the duo work that would follow.
Both the Brahms and Rachmaninoff selections allowed (encouraged?) the pianist to be more “pianistic.” By the time he was working on the first cello sonata, Brahms had already been exploring writing chamber music for piano and strings, never being shy about working piano virtuosity into the mix. As a result, there are times when Opus 38 sounds a bit like a piano trio where the violinist never bothered to put in an appearance. Needless to say, the violin is not missed; and Capuçon took a vigorously expressive approach to his part to establish confidently that this sonata was decidedly not “all about the piano.”
However, it was in the Rachmaninoff sonata that the attentive listener could best appreciate that “dialog of equals” at its rhetorically richest. Perhaps his attentiveness to the independence of the cello line grew out of his early experiences in writing collections of songs, since there is no shortage of “vocalizations” in the cello parts. Perhaps it was just his awareness of how different the sonority of the cello was from anything he could evoke from his piano. However, what emerged in the performance of the Opus 19 sonata last night was a sense of intimacy that is seldom encountered in the Rachmaninoff compositions that receive the most attention.
Nevertheless, that sense of vocalization would then be underscored in the first of the three encores taken at the end of the program. This was Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” the last of the fourteen songs in his Opus 34 collection from 1912, consisting of a melodic line without any words. This has become a favorite encore selection, since just about any solo instrument can play along with the piano accompaniment. (I once accompanied a bassoonist in a reading of this piece.)
This was followed by the second (Allegro) movement from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 40 sonata in D minor, based on a wacky ostinato pattern, which may well have been trying to make fun of some thuggish Soviet authority (Stalin himself?) trying to dance. Capuçon and Thibaudet then withdrew from the (intentionally) ridiculous to the sublime warhorse of the cello repertoire, the movement entitled “Le cygne” (the swan), from Camille Saint-Saëns’ suite The Carnival of the Animals. Originally composed for cello and two pianos, the single-piano version still captures the stillness of the lake across which the swan glides (and, unlike the swan in Mikhail Fokine’s choreographic setting of this music, does not succumb to death).
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