Exile
Works by A Panufnik, Schnittke, Schubert, Wyschnegradsky, Ysaÿe et al
Thomas Kaufmann (cello); Camerata Bern/Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Alpha Classics ALPHA1110 74:53 mins
Clip: 'Kugikly' for Violin and Ukrainian and Russian Panpipes (Patricia Kopatchinskaja et al)
Exile reinvents nationalism. Loss and trauma imbue the psyche with an inner turmoil and a sense of longing for the country of your birth. Equally, such feelings coexist with a burning necessity to assimilate into a different cultural environment, thereby creating new paths of expression. This turbulent mix is inevitably reflected in the music written by composers who experienced the trauma of displacement, whether as a result of political, racial or financial persecution.
In this brilliantly recorded programme, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Camerata Bern eschew some of the more familiar exiled composers of the 20th century, opting instead to feature a sequence of fascinating and stylistically diverse works, all of which deserve to be far better known.
An equally vital ingredient in Kopatchinskaja’s programme is folk music. Indeed, the album opens with a particularly hypnotic drone-like arrangement for violins of the Ukrainian folk tune Kugikly, and there is also a haunting Moldovan melody ‘Cuckoo with grey feathers’, vocally intoned in spare two- part harmony by Kopatchinskaja and Vlad Popescu against a mesmerising background of string orchestra harmonics. Another delight is the third of Schubert’s 5 Minuets and 6 Trios – a treasurable early miniature whose poignancy and sense of inner loneliness provides a remarkable portent of the composer’s later works.
Perhaps the major discovery, however, is the Violin Concerto by the exiled Polish composer, Andrzej Panufnik, written for Yehudi Menuhin and premiered in London in the early 1970s. Although a number of distinguished recordings of this work are already available, I doubt whether any performance comes near to this one in terms of its conviction, commitment and intensity. Quite simply, Kopatchinskaja lives and breathes every note, enabling her and the excellent Camerata Bern to invest the music with a spellbinding variety of colours, dynamics and timbres.
More desolate often nightmarish visions are projected in Thomas Kaufmann’s eloquent performance of Schnittke’s First Cello Sonata. It is presented here in a remarkably persuasive arrangement for cello, strings and harpsichord by Martin Merker which follows the kind of timbres that are familiar from the composer’s First Concerto Grosso. A particularly spooky moment occurs near the end of the second movement Presto where cello and harpsichord engage in frenetic unison passagework, sounding as if two wasps are furiously stinging their foes.
Despite its employment of quarter tones and some trenchantly dissonant harmonies, the Second Quartet by Russian exile Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who settled permanently in Paris in 1920, is a far less troubled work. Indeed, the principal soloists of the Camerata Bern, inspired by Kopatchinskaja’s magnetic personality, inflect the music with a good deal of humour.
Finally, we come to the remarkable atmospheric symphonic poem Exil! by Eugène Ysaÿe. Composed in 1917 at a time when the Belgian composer was marooned in the United States while his homeland was being ravaged by the German army, the work’s scoring for violins and violas without bass instruments perfectly conveys a rootlessness that is an inevitable consequence of enforced exile. Erik Levi
