Reviews

AHO String Quartets nos.1–3 Stenhammar Quartet

BIS BIS-2069 (SACD)

Fascinating youthful forays into the quartet genre

With their proudly worn influences from earlier music – Bach, Brahms, Britten, for example, but above all, Shostakovich – it’s perhaps tempting to dismiss the three early string quartets that Finnish composer Kalevi Aho wrote while still at school and at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy as mere student exercises. But there’s already a thoroughly distinctive, eloquent voice emerging in these works from his late teens and early twenties, one that the Stockholm-based Stenhammar Quartet captures unerringly in passionate performances that make a strong case for the quartets’ drama and deep emotion.

The Stenhammar players expertly convey the Second Quartet’s shifting moods, from its despairing, Shostakovichian opening (given a particularly cool, reedy account) to the warmth of its lyrical finale. They really embrace the almost orchestral richness of the Third Quartet too – cast in eight short, continuous movements, and charting a cathartic journey from innocence to experience – and they discover a clear line of intent threaded through the somewhat disparate ideas and textures of its episodic structure.

The Stenhammar musicians might have less to work with in the somewhat more derivative First Quartet – written by the self-taught Aho as an 18-year-old schoolboy – but they’re nonetheless faithful to its high drama and rich imagination. Recorded sound is close and authentic, but it also captures the performers’ breathing a little distractingly at times.

DAVID KETTLE

BACH Cello Suites nos.1 and 2 Sonia Wieder-Atherton (cello)

ALPHA 1053

Bach seen through a Romantic filter that won’t be to all tastes

Ever the experimenter, American cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton’s first two Bach suites are the complete antithesis of most recent recordings. Atmospherically recorded in the resonant acoustic of the refectory of the Abbaie de Noirlac, these are free-flowing, spacious, often idiosyncratic interpretations.

Whereas over the past few decades cellists have tended to take their cue for the bowings from the available contemporary manuscripts, Wieder-Atherton liberally adds slurs and rubato – in the G major Prelude there is hardly a separate bow in sight, the pedal notes resonating beautifully at the start of each bar.

In keeping with the Romantic tenor of her interpretations, Wieder-Atherton, who studied at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatoire before winning the 1986 Rostropovich Competition, often uses vibrato for expression, but pulls the tempo around to the extent that it sometimes impedes the flow. Both Allemandes are a case in point, with no.2’s more a private meditation than a dance.

There is character aplenty in her playing. Her G major minuets are whimsical, tripping along cheekily, while the D minor pair are characterised by crisp staccato quavers and plenty of white space. The Sarabandes are super-slow, the G major gently meditative, with the occasional hint of portamento.

JANET BANKS

DEBUSSY Four Préludes; Cello Sonata RAVEL Pièce en forme de Habanera; Kaddisch; Sonatine; Sonate posthume Roger Benedict (viola) Simon Tedeschi (piano)

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Convincing borrowings for viola, performed with aplomb

Neither Debussy nor Ravel wrote any music for viola and piano: with the exception of the latter composer’s Sonatine, performed in its original guise as a piano solo, all the pieces included here are arrangements, mostly made by British-born, Sydney-based soloist and teacher, Roger Benedict. Those works stemming from vocal, violin and cello originals have been straightforwardly transcribed, Ravel’s Pièce en forme de Habanera – a wordless vocalise – necessitating no changes at all. In Kaddisch – another song – Benedict includes a most effective octave drop that fits perfectly with a change of register in the (original) piano part. Ravel’s early Violin Sonata does need some changes of octave, and they have been convincingly managed. The relationship between the conspicuously high-lying piano part and the solo instrument is altered but still works. Conversely, I’m less taken by Debussy’s ‘Viola’ Sonata, where the upwardly transposed solo part sounds too far from what’s happening at the piano!