RICHARD JENKINSON and BENJAMIN FRITH
SATURDAY 25th JUNE 2011
Russian Passion
A programme of Russian classics, cellist Richard Jenkinson and pianist Benjamin Frith - a package that seemed to offer everything! This was what Music Nairn was offering in Nairn Community Centre on Saturday evening and a large crowd was fairly buzzing with anticipation.
The concert opened with the most modern work, a reworking of Stravinsky´s ballet music Pulcinella for cello and piano completed by the composer in consultation with the great Russian cellist Piatigorski. While the orchestral suite can sound overblown, a few simple ideas tediously overworked, this arrangement had a freshness and originality of texture about it which made it much more engaging. The full idiomatic potential of both instruments was exploited with startling originality, and both players clearly demonstrated their complete mastery.
In Shostakovich´s D-minor Sonata for cello and piano we have a remarkable personal document, expressing its composer´s inner turmoil at an emotional and creative turning point in his life. Shostakovich was in love of the extra-marital variety, causing a disruption in the otherwise steady relationship with his wife Nina, but he was also under attack from the Russian musical establishment, ironically for being "too bourgeois". As so often the suffering of a creative genius leads to a masterpiece, but it is hard not to share Shostakovich's pain as the frenetic Allegro, the bleak Largo and the final cynical Allegro unfold. The intensity of Jenkinson and Frith's reading made the experience all but unbearable, with the sheer power of the cello's tone filling the performance space.
Richard Jenkinson's cello, originally made in the late 17th century, is a truly remarkable instrument which has clearly been in the wars, has been heavily adapted and even has a filled toggle-hole in its back from when it was played in church processions. It is extraordinary to think that an instrument which when new might have played the music of Gabrieli or Monteverdi is now tangling with the most demanding music of the twentieth century!
At any rate it sounded completely at home in the music of Rachmaninov as the duo moved on to that master's rhapsodic G-minor Sonata, perhaps the most perfect romantic music ever written for cello and piano. Like the composer's piano concertos and symphonies, the cello Sonata moves seamlessly from the lyrical to the passionate to the serene as this supreme master of melody finds tunes which seem to fit perfectly the idiom of both instruments. If the duo's playing had achieved a higher plane in their reading of Shostakovich, the Rachmaninov inhabited the same territory of inspired lyricism. This was a very beautiful interpretation, which sounded effortless but which explored every subtle nuance of a remarkable work. Meanwhile I was transported into my own private reverie, recalling a production by the Clifton Players of Turgenev's A Month in the Country nearly thirty years ago which had featured the piece, as well as subsequent performances of the sonata at Clifton House by some of the finest cellists of our time. And the present performance can proudly take its place in that distinguished gallery.
D James Ross