HEINRICH SCHIFF
at Ravinia Festival
Most cello recitals are pretty dull affairs. There’s the obligatory 18th-century Bach suite, usually played in 19th-century style with large vibrato and stodgy tempi, and then a selection of 19th-century sonatas for cello and piano. Only a handful of those pieces are musically interesting, and most are mere showcases for the instrument.
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It’s startling to realize that it has been only a century since the 13-year-old Pablo Casals found the six Bach suites for solo cello on a dusty shelf in a secondhand shop in Barcelona and rescued the largely unknown pieces for posterity. Casals worked on the pieces every day for 12 years until he felt ready to present them to the public, and almost immediately they took their rightful place as the cornerstone of the cello repertoire. They are miraculous pieces, exploiting the musical possibilities of the instrument in a way not heard before or since. They were written virtually in a vacuum–the cello wasn’t heard as an unaccompanied instrument before Bach (it originated as a portable bass-string instrument for processions, and was later used as an integral part in realizing continuo passages).
The Brahms First Cello Sonata is the first instrumental sonata Brahms ever wrote (excluding pieces Brahms himself never cataloged), and he labored over it for three years before it took the form we now recognize. Here Schiff’s playing was so close to the edge that he sometimes slipped over it, as he did in the buzzy fugue entrance that opened the finale (a Brahmsian tribute to Bach). The intensity was so extreme that Schiff snapped a string. Few things will ruin the mood and symmetry of a Brahms cello sonata like a broken string in the climax, and many musicians would have been so unnerved by such an unfortunate situation that their concentration would have been destroyed and their tempers triggered. But Schiff made the best of it by making a joke. “I hope there are a lot of cellists out there,” he said. “Especially one with an A string. That was my last one.” Amazingly enough, one hurried backstage with string in hand, and after a few minutes offstage Schiff was back finishing the piece. Both before and after the broken string this was extraordinary Brahms playing–it was never oversentimentalized, and it explored a variety of moods and contrasts. Schiff was fortunate to have the collaboration of pianist Samuel Sanders, who was able to keep up with Schiff’s intensity and sudden shifts of mood and color.
Soviet-born pianist Shura Cherkassky is one of the last of a dying breed of great master pianists in the Romantic tradition, making a rare recital here by him an event. I hadn’t heard him when he was here in ’87, and I wasn’t prepared for the clarity and brilliance of his playing given his age (late 70s). But he was able to toss off a recital of fascinating and difficult repertoire more convincingly than pianists half his age. Like Schiff, he is a totally committed and giving performer who isn’t afraid to challenge himself, and he delivered one of the most substantial and thrilling piano recitals heard here in recent memory.
Again, the pairing of Berg and Stockhausen was no accident: the one a prelude, the other a postlude to the 12-tone movement that so dominated much of the 20th century, with Stockhausen representing the total serialization of all musical elements. Stockhausen has called his piano music his drawings and his electronic compositions his paintings. In truth his Klavierstuck IX is pretty dated, dependent more on effects than substance, but Cherkassky managed to give it some refinement. With its repeated low, chromatic chord built on tritones, it still sounds to me much like that awful “train” piece found in every Schwann beginning piano method book.
