Elliott Launches Second SFS Spotlight Series

Cellist Sterling Elliott (from the SFS Web page for this performance)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall saw the return of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Spotlight Series, now called the Shenson Spotlight Series. The “spotlight” of the title refers to the fact that the series consists entirely of debut performances, providing emerging talents with “a place in the spotlight.” Last night’s “talent” was cellist Sterling Elliott, who took an imaginative approach to presenting his debut.

In the spirt of Sesame Street’s presentation of a program “sponsored by the letter ‘D,’” Elliott presented a program of cello music “sponsored” by the key of D major. The works were presented in chronological order, beginning with Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1012 in D major, the last of the composer’s six unaccompanied cello suites. Bach was complemented by a nineteenth-century composer that was heavily influenced by that eighteenth-century composer’s works.

The second half of the program presented Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 58 (second) cello sonata, also in D major. Elliott was accompanied at the piano by Elliot Wuu; and, since this was Mendelssohn’s music, the attentive listener would not have been surprised that the music for piano was no mere accompaniment. Beside the fact that both of these compositions share the same key, it is worth nothing that Mendelssohn’s Adagio movement begins with a piano solo that very clearly evokes the chorales composed by Bach.

It is a bit of a pity that Mendelssohn’s sonata does not get more attention. Readers that have followed my work for some time know that I take great pleasure in writing about “anthology” collections of recordings of major cellists of the past. Given the number of cellists that have received this treatment, I was more than a little surprised to discover that only two of them had recorded Opus 58: Gregory Piatigorsky and János Starker. Elliott and Wuu made a solid case that this was music that deserves more attention; and, hopefully, other emerging cello talents will be persuaded to follow their lead.

Elliott took a very personal approach to his Bach performance, which was almost immediately clear from his expressive phrasing of the opening prelude. The following dance forms were a bit more variable in interpretation. Where any sense of the dance was concerned, Elliott was most in his element with the concluding gavottes and gigue. To be fair, however, how much do we really know about any rhetorical foundations for dances such as allemandes, courantes, and sarabands? At most we know that the last of these three forms tended to be stately; but even that “knowledge” may be questionable.

As a result, Elliott laid out his own personal paths for dealing with expressive performances of those three dance forms. Having heard him only this one time, I would say that the ideas he brought to his interpretations were all credible and, for the most part, engaging. I also enjoyed the way in which he approached the opening prelude with its own gigue rhythms, making it a “mirror image” of the suite’s final movement. His approach to Bach may not have been “historically informed;” but there is no question that it was “well informed” by Elliott’s thoughtful approaches to interpretation.

More chamber music for cello please!