OVER UNDER
Move Records MCD 611
This disc comes out of a long-term, long-distance relationship between Australian cellist/conductor Severn and American pianist/composer Fein. A marriage of two aesthetics has apparently come about here and the musicians have a fairly well-established performance history (USA in 2019, Australia in 2022) from which comes one of the two works recorded here: Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor. Following the California/New York accounts of Fein’s first Cello Sonata, they’ve set down here the other constituent of their Melbourne/Bendigo/Frankston recitals: Fein’s second essay in the form.
And that’s all there is: 28′ 55″ for the Fein, 28′ 34″ for the Brahms; near-equivalent in temporal terms. But, while you can admire the American’s work for its coherence and bursts of brilliant writing, its thunder is stolen by the Brahms reading which is distinctive in its vision and delivery. Which is the chief problem with this pairing: much as you’d like to find high merit in the Fein, the other outclasses it, to the extent that you wonder why the composer didn’t think to give his work a less striking companion.
The modern work is in four movements: Serene, warm; Redemptive, resonant; Molto scherzando; Lively, playful. It begins with a simple rising two-note cell in the cello that expands on itself. Straight away we’re in a benign atmosphere of something approaching hymn music, broadening to a firm declamation couched in a harmony that Brahms would have found comfortable, if eccentric. Then the work seems to meander into an episode rich in piano triplets, shared with the cello, and a development that moves into new material, both instruments in a close interface.
Once again, the declamation arises and we’re in late Romantic territory – both firmly assertive and ruminative as the opening cell recurs and the exposition’s processes are revisited. This is a music of alternating moods which, near the end, seems to see the triumph of the serene. But not so: Fein ends with a presto flourish for both players; it’s almost as though he’s providing a contrast with the placid rhythmic tenor of his movement’s procedure up till now.
When it comes to redemptive music, I’m not sure what to expect; it could be anything from the Dies irae to L’Ascension, and a world or six of religious music in between. Here, we have a slow sequence of repeated chords in the keyboard under the cello outlining a well-woven melody that stretches for some length towards a climax, that breaks off and then resumes its path with cello and piano more synchronised in their thinking, although the keyboard’s initial repetitions seem to be the spur to action. We are led to a consoling stretch of diatonic affirmation that ends up resembling a Bloch cantillation.
A sequence of common chords leads back to the opening repeated chords under the meandering string line; the same crisis, with the keyboard sustaining its support for a final mellifluously brooding semi-cadence. In these pages, the emphasis for me fell more on the resonant, the performers reaching two points of impressive suspense, as well as a brace of powerful statements that emphasized the possibilities for broad statements. For all that, the harmonic language is, in the main, orthodox; we just have to accept this mode of contemporary composition that is content with titillating the past, not building on it.
The following scherzo strikes me as far from molto, possibly hampered by a rhythmic irregularity/juxtaposition that obtains from the opening but gives way to a smooth body of play across the movement’s centre before returning to round out this simple ternary structure. The instruments are busy with some clever canonic scale descents that inevitably bring Shostakovich to mind, if without that composer’s verve and ferocity. Still, I did like the cello’s final ‘bent’-note slight portamento.
Further reminiscences come bursting in at the finale’s opening, chiefly of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the animals with the piano’s high-register tinkling while the string line follows its restrained jollity before swinging into an amiable, crowd-pleasing melody. Much of what follows appear to be variants on these two elements with some late attempts at post-impressionist harmonic adventurousness. But Fein doesn’t stray too far from well-trodden paths; just when you think he’s heading in a dissonant direction with an unexpected modulation, he hauls us back to the plain-speaking path of diatonicism. Listen to the final minute or so which is an excellent example of leading towards calm acceptance before a semi-aggressive, if defiantly positive, resolution.
I need hardly record the players’ obvious intensity and painstaking care with Fein’s score. Is either of them taxed by this music-making? Not that much, although some parts of the last two movements have their pressure-points. Yet the sonata presents as rather lightweight, for all the grandiose passages in the opening movements. Certainly, Fein has produced a highly competent work yet it doesn’t hold much that could be termed striking or original. Even its passion is tautly leashed and its appurtenances fail to catch this listener’s interest.
What follows – the Brahms sonata elucidation – is quite remarkable. In the CD liner notes, Fein observes that ‘we dare to hope that some of our bolder musical decisions allow audiences to enjoy this beloved sonata in a new light’. Well, to those of us with a long-standing affection for the piece (many thanks, Daniel Horrigan, for those hours of tolerant rehearsal), this reading offers many insights. The duo takes the first movement’s ma non troppo direction seriously; this is a stately progress through the first subject, its only defect coming through an over-amplification of the cello line. But Severn and Fein have a fine eye for the work’s inner accelerations and dynamic contrasts which make this allegro an absorbing experience, with a good deal of the commonly accepted bravado muted into the composer’s inimitable introspection. Only an odd misfired cello A in bar 18 disturbs the exposition’s accuracy, which is flawless on the repeat.
The most obvious of those interpolated accelerandi comes at bar 50 in the vehement build-up to the B minor explosion of bars 57-8. What follows is a masterful depiction of the descent to gloom across bars 74 to 77. Later, in the development, a gradual increase in tension starting at about bar 102 is accomplished by a simple consensus of dynamic heft working towards the fortissimo F minor resolution of bar 126. Further re-acquaintance with the artists’ approach comes in the recapitulation which follows a similar pattern of subtle speed and dynamic increases and subtractions, highpoints the cello’s vital high in bar 222, determines a dark-shaded coda approach from bar 235 on, and culminates in a moving processional across the movement’s final 20 bars.
Severn and Fein hit on the ideal approach to Brahms’ Allegretto. It is given a minuet’s lilt in the outer sections, Fein picking and choosing which staccato directions he’ll observe (all of them in the opening bars, more selective in the left hand of the second half in this section [bars 16 to 27]). Adding to this excellent clarity of delivery, the central trio from Fein is clog-free with a welcome lack of glutinous pedaling, despite the direction to sustain from bar 79 in my old Breitkopf & Hartel edition. This helps give the movement a kind of unity, ensuring a continuity of output, even if the minuet’s return still piques because of the absence of its trio’s continuous two-semiquaver-plus-quaver pattern from the keyboard and a reversion to ye old-fashioned rustic courtliness.
To end, Brahms starts out a fugue, but it doesn’t sustain its formal characteristics. Fein states the subject with plenty of detached notes; not quite abrupt enough to come under a staccato heading and still maintaining a melodic contour. And the first climacteric at bars 24 to 25 is a true Brahmsian welter, if one where the instruments maintain audibility and their lines carry distinctly right through the interleaving of lines up to bar 53’s light relief and the rubato brought into play at bar 61 where dance wins out; the same gentle hesitation that the duo employed in the previous movement’s trio. I was struck by an odd tuning error from Severn on the B in bar 72, and a Fein slip in the C minor triad of bar 93. But almost immediately, the lack of brutal teeth-marks in the closely-argued mesh from bars 115 to 123 merits strong approval for its communication of polyphonic stress rather than instrumental effort.
If Severn and Fein come close to your traditional Brahms thickness round the waist, it’s in the final pages from bar 152 and through the coda Piu presto which is, compared to the rest of the interpretation, thunderous and virtuosic in the best sense of serving the score through craft. It brings this reading to a highly satisfying consummation. In the end, it realizes that declared intention of shedding ‘a new light’ on the score which here takes on an unexpected transparency in its instrumental interplay and a welcome immediacy due to an enlightened approach to dynamic levels and care in sound production.
O'Connell the Music 