Cellist Oliver Mascarenhas’ Debut Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

The very first time that cellist Oliver Mascarenhas auditioned for an orchestral position was in 1997. The position was with the NDR Radiophilharmonie, the public broadcasting German radio orchestra, affiliated with the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) in Hanover. The audition was a successful one, as was his subsequent participation in international competitions.

Almost exactly a month ago Dreyer Gaido Musikproduktionen released his debut album, whose “main attraction” is his performance of a cello concerto that Friedrich Gulda composed for cello and wind band. This five-movement concerto is coupled with three short pieces for cello and piano by Nicolai Kapustin. The album then concludes with four “bonus tracks” of Gulda leading his own trio in jazz selections by Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, and Frank Foster.

Readers may recall that, this past February, I reviewed five Gulda albums based on remastered tapes recorded by Südwestrundfunk (SWR, southwest broadcasting), the public radio service for the southwest of Germany. One of those albums was entitled Jazz and included a solo piano set that Gulda performed at the 1971 Heidelberger Jazztage. To some extent the four standards tracks at the end of the new Dreyer Gaido album, which were recorded in 1958, complement the solo Heidelberg tracks.

More interesting, however, is the concerto, which almost seems to thumb its nose at any effort at genre classification. All five movements are playful, each in its own characteristic way; and the interplay between the solo cello and the wind band is always engaging. Nevertheless, Gulda seems to enjoy playing at the threshold of outrageousness; and this is most evident in the cadenza, which constitutes the middle movement of the concerto.

This is the longest movement of the entire composition, a little over ten minutes in duration. While it provides an excellent platform to display the cellist’s technical skills, Gulda cannot resist going over the top towards the end of the movement by allowing the diversity of riffs that the cellist has already explored to erupt into a no-holds-barred account of “Purple Haze.” (Gulda composed this concerto in 1980, so it may well be the case that he had “staked out” this tune before it entered the repertoire of the Kronos Quartet.)

I last wrote about Kapustin when Alison Lee played his Opus 41 set of variations for her Piano Break recital. My “first contact” with Kapustin came from a Yuja Wang encore; and his understanding of jazz is comparable with Gulda’s. However, the three short selections played by Mascarenhas are not as outrageous as Kapustin’s approach to piano music, which manages to fold Cecil Taylor into a context that also includes Count Basie and Erroll Garner. Nevertheless, there is a playfulness to those three pieces, whose opus numbers happen to be 96, 97, and 98. In many ways Kapustin’s “jazz voice” provides just the right bridge between Gulda’s over-the-top approach to concerto composition and his more traditional approaches to the four standards that conclude the album.