In Memoriam II – JS Bach: Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor; Britten: Cello Suite No. 3 – Passacaglia; Kodály: Sonata for Solo Cello
Pieter Wispelwey (cello)
Evil Penguin EPRC 0056 60:26 mins
This album was born out of tragedy: the death of Pieter Wispelwey’s 16 year-old
son Dorian in an accident last year. As Wispelwey has said, ‘losing a child is a thousand-fold heart-break’. Yet he and his oboist wife did ‘find salvation’ in returning to making music.
The choice of scordatura solo works for this album ‘in memoriam’ has deep significance: here is music for a world retuned. In Bach’s suite in C minor, which Wispelwey performed at the funeral, the cello’s top A string is tuned down to G, removing the instrument’s ‘shine’, transforming it into a messenger of darkness. The diminished fourth interval that also recurs in this piece was for Wispelwey symbolic of the diminishment of their once four-strong family. This will always be a sombre work, but Wispelwey’s reading has wonderful life and elasticity, the opening fugue a crisp dance, and inner dances powerfully focused. At its heart lies the extraordinary, naked Sarabande. It’s impossible not to find solace in its ineluctable harmonic logic, and impossible not to be profoundly moved by Wispelwey’s self-effacing reading, a performance heavy with held-back tears.
Wispelwey, always a musician of high ambition and intense idealism, has recorded and ‘conquered’ Kodály’s great ‘predator’, the solo sonata, before, but returning to it he recognises now an ‘orgy of resilience’. Here is a performance of blistering energy and lustre from an artist utterly fluent in its language. The final Allegro is surely one of the fastest on record, driven by an almost diabolical force. The album closes with a starkly expressive reading of the Passacaglia from Britten’s Suite No. 3. Devastating. Helen Wallace
