Cover of the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)
The beginning of this month saw the release by Bridge Records of the album Passages, a diversity of selections performed by cellist Louise Dubin, joined by another cellist, Julia Bruskin, and pianist Spencer Meyer. The subtitle of the album is “French Cello Works;” and it continues her interest in the music of Auguste Franchomme, which had previously been recorded on the Delos album The Franchomme Project, on which she also performed with Bruskin. The other composers represented on the album are (in order of appearance) Charles Koechlin, Gabriel Fauré, Frédéric Chopin (piano music arranged for cello and piano by Franchomme), Francis Poulenc (arranged by Maurice Gendron), Philippe Hersant, and Claude Debussy.
Most listeners will probably find this album a journey of discovery. Dubin saved the most familiar for the last, Debussy’s only sonata for cello and piano. Some readers may also recognize Franchomme’s name from when cellist Camille Thomas played his arrangements of Chopin for a San Francisco Performances recital in April of 2024. Dubin’s album includes another such arrangement, this time of the seventh the twelve études collected in Opus 25.
While it would be fair to say that Dubin is not shy about diversity, I found that both the selections for this new album and how they were ordered began to feel like “one thing after another” after the first few tracks. This is not to say that her technique lacks expressiveness. Nevertheless, after listening to the album several times, I found that my attention began to drift somewhere around the middle of the fourteen tracks. Perhaps if I sat in the audience for one of Dubin’s recitals, I would have come away with more positive impressions.
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