O1C Solo Recital Disappoints Again

As was the case at the end of this past January, yesterday afternoon Old First Concerts (O1C) began its series of March programs with a disappointing live-streamed solo recital. This time the recitalist was cellist Anita Graef, performing before a single camera and microphone from a room that contained little more than a piano. The pianist was Louise Chan, who accompanied Graef for the last three selections of her program. The first two were solo performances, and all selections were given brief introductions by Graef.

To be fair, Graef got off to a good start, opening with Nina Shekhar’s “Cajón,” named after the hand-played percussion instrument that is little more than a resonant box. Shekhar’s score requires the cellist to evoke similar percussive sounds from the body of the instrument, serving as exchanges with the bowed passages. Graef was clearly comfortable with Shekhar’s upbeat rhetoric, and she presented the music to make the case that Shekhar’s ideas amounted to more than a mere parlor trick.

Unfortunately, when she then progressed to Teagan Faran’s solo cello arrangement of “El Choclo,” one of the most familiar tango tunes, whose composer is Ángel Villoldo, things started to go downhill. There was too much uncertainty in Graef’s sense of pitch, and her rhythms were not always up to Villoldo’s sensuous rhetoric. However, the real disappointments began with the inclusion of the piano.

The major problem was technical. Most likely the only microphone was one attached to the camera at one end of the room. The piano, on the other hand, was at the far side of the other end of the room, with Graef sitting half-way between microphone and accompanist. This made for an aggravatingly unbalanced account of the three duo selections and may also have explained why Graef’s pitch did not always align with Chan’s piano work. Most disappointing was the account of Robert Schumann’s Opus 70 coupling of Adagio and Allegro movements in A-flat major, which never registered convincingly in the domains of pitch, rhythm, and phrasing.

Presumably, the performance would have benefited from a space more conducive to engagement between soloist and accompanist; but this was a program in which both execution and video capture were equally dissatisfying.