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Reviewer: Peter Quantrill
We have Pablo Casals most to thank for the cello’s renaissance as a solo instrument in the first half of the 20th century, and composers such as Cassadó, Reger and Kodály inevitably took their cue from the Solo Suites of Bach, which had remained uncontested as the only significant works composed for the genre in the intervening century and a half. What Casals would make of the timbral extensions and techniques deployed by the five composers on Séverine Ballon’s disc must be left to the imagination, but he would surely admire Ballon’s fearless commitment and her ability to find a distinct expressive world for each of them. He might find a satisfying narrative continuity in Parjanya-Vata – not always a quality associated with James Dillon – and he could surely chuckle with admiration at the interventions of artificial birdcalls and sundry percussion in Mauro Lanza’s carnivalesque portrait in sound of a battle which lives up to previous depictions in paint and word by Bruegel and Rabelais.
Lanza includes a pianist, whereas the album’s title-work by Rebecca Saunders is an interior monologue which, thanks to Ballon’s advocacy, seems to bypass the executant and travel deep within the mind and body of the instrument: animated yet left to its own devices, this is surely what a lonely cello would sound like, late at night with a whisky to hand. Liza Lim’s ‘study in flickering modulations’ shimmers between the 12 notes of the chromatic scale with the aid of a second, ‘güiro’ bow that rasps and grazes between wood and hair, but the scordatura tuning serves a more urgent expressive end in Thierry Blondeau’s Blackbird, building up to the point where the title makes sense – but I wouldn’t want to give his game away.
Even though the 20th-century classics for solo cello – most written for Rostropovich – are the most compelling items on Mayke Rademakers’s album, they don’t make her account of the Cello Suites competitive in an exceptionally crowded market. This is principally down to the Sixth Suite, where she seems hamstrung by using her usual instrument rather than a smaller, five-string cello on which the chords are more naturally spaced. Intonation suffers accordingly, and the double- and triplestopping is effortfully sustained.
Rademakers does
eventually switch to another instrument – an electric cello – for two soulful,
multi-movement improvisations which have their roots in dance (bolero, tango,
blues, more funky and industrial rhythms too) no less than Bach. The Dutch
church acoustic clouds her quicker runs in Bach, whereas she tames the echo with
a robust projection worthy of Slava himself in Britten, Schnittke and the rest.
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