Low Strings in the Early Nineteenth Century

Charles Chandler and Amos Yang playing Rossini’s virtuosic duet (screen shot courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

This past Thursday cellist Amos Yang and bassist Charles Chandler, both members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), contributed their third contribution to the Chamber Music Series of videos streamed by SFSymphony+. The first two offerings presented works by contemporary composers, both of whom are bassists: Shinji Eshima, based (pun sort of intended) here in San Francisco, and Argentinian Andrés Martin. The new video takes listeners back to the first quarter of the nineteenth century with a D major duet in three movements by Gioachino Rossini.

This piece was composed in 1824. In the timeline of Rossini’s abundant catalog of operas, this far more modest offering (less than a quarter of an hour in duration) was composed in the year after the premiere performance of Semiramide at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. It is worth speculating that Rossini’s instrumental music tended to favor brevity, perhaps allowing him to take a break from the longeurs of his operatic efforts. Nevertheless, this duet demands just as much virtuosic skill as any of the many operatic arias that Rossini composed.

Furthermore, there is no shortage of wit lurking behind all that virtuosity. All three of the movements are basically structured around a give-and-take rhetoric between the two musicians. The cello, being the more agile of the two instruments (as we know from the demands found in the music of Rossini’s Italian predecessor, Luigi Boccherini), tends to confront the bass with technical challenges, allowing the bass to respond in kind proudly with a “So there!” rhetoric. In their performance for the new video, Yang and Chandler clearly appreciated this suggestion of rivalry, resulting in an account that is not only abundant in wit but also jaw-dropping in technical excellence.

Sometimes the low strings just want to have fun.