Shostakovich and Schnittke Cello Sonatas
Alban Gerhardt – cello
Steven Osborne – piano
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)
Hyperion Records CDA67534 | 78'50
RECORDING OF THE MONTH (Musicweb)
CHICAGO READER BEST OF 2006
Gerhardt and Osborne are perfectly attuned to the music's nuances and more expressive gestures... Simply put, this is the most convincing version of this sonata I've ever heard
— Fanfare, USA
Schnittke is Shostakovich’s successor in life, art and on this CD. Gerhardt and Osborne play the finale of the older composer’s sonata with a beautiful fluency, highlighting the cello’s running semiquavers and the piano’s pinging scales, which then reappear in the thrilling presto of the younger’s homage-filled work. There could have been more grit in Schnittke’s whirlwind, but the heart-clenching sorrow the duo depicts elsewhere, particularly in the Madrigal for Oleg Kagan, is a compensation. The programme ends lightly with Shostakovich’s Eight Pieces for Cello and Piano, which are short, catchy, childish and fun
— The Times
Beautifully recorded and played, this is a disc that enchants simply through the sound it makes. Both Gerhardt and Osborne are noted especially for their poetic insights and whenever the music turns introspective here they cast a magic spell so as to have one hanging on to their every note
— Classic FM Magazine
Because Gerhardt and Osborne do not blast out Shostakovich’s music statically and obsessively, and do not make him play the same old role of the eternally divided soul with sewing-machine rhythms and tortured pathos, they take him seriously as a sound painter in chamber-music style. This fabulous recording is meaningfully rounded out with Alfred Schnittke’s sonata for cello and piano, the very piece that followed Shostakovich, and two pieces by Schnittke for solo cello, including a wonderful pale-moonlight madrigal with a static melodic pattern, and then, finally, arrangements of some Shostakovich bagatelles. In all: a well-conceived production, expressive playing, generously packed (80 minutes) – a must-buy
Wirdschaftswoche, Germany
The peformers give vivid and briliant delineations in this well-balanced recording
— The Strad
I cannot recommend this disc enough. True, it is full-price, but I bet you will play it many more times than a multitude of super-budgets. Superb.
— Musicweb
It is done with trememdous drama and conviction and a dynamic range that will challenge your ears and speakers.
— American Record Guide
Dmitri Shostakovich carved the scherzo of his Sonata in D minor for Violoncello and Piano op. 40 out of a dizzy deathsome spin. The staccato in the piano part sounds like the bony rattle of a xylophone. Evil shades haunt the harmonic phrases of the cello in the trio. After just three and a half minutes the whole thing is over: as quick as flash, malicious, this little dance. But for the slow introduction to the following Largo, Shostakovich created a kind of never-ending melody. It describes a generous ascending arch: a cello recitative, supported only by a few pillars of piano chords. Hardly has one noticed that a phrase has ended than it begins all over again. Alban Gerhardt plays this quasi-recitative at only half-volume, as if speaking aside, into the backstage area. The elegy that then arises is sung bloomingly and magnificently from the full breast of the cello, with the passion of a full-vibrato tone … But because this D minor sonata was actually the first major work of chamber music by Shostakovich that he himself let stand; because – in four movements, faithful to sonata form, with regular recapitulations – it also has definite conservative-romantic features and seems to lay aside anything would-be revolutionary; for these reasons there is also a strong temptation to see it as an early witness of the biographical-compositional rearguard action – and to interpret it correspondingly, highlighting its contrasts. The great young Berlin cello virtuoso, Alban Gerhardt, and his piano accompanist, Steven Osborne, are not exaggerating when they do so. Their reading is still differentiated, always closer to the sound-speech of the composer’s text than to extra-musical hints and suggestions. The range of expressive variants is admirably wide, the rhythmic precision and the cleverly balanced dynamics in the way they play together is no less impressive than the range of pianistic and cellistic tone colours. In this presentation, simply everything is in keeping. The duo also arranges the cello sonata of Alfred Schnittke, written for Nathalia Gutman in 1978, in a lucid and clear fashion, with its melancholy twelve-tone sequence at the beginning and the presto drive threatening to become a tempest in the middle. How this duo gives itself to this deadly long-distance run and still insists on beauty of tone is something one just has to have heard. And the small “encores” on the album? Every one of them a poem in itself
— FAZ, Germany
[Alban Gerhardt] came late to the instrument, but now his mastery of it is both virtuoso and disrespectful, both individual and intellectual. His play is direct and boisterous, but then again astonishingly soft and open to all sorts of fleeting suggestions. He is not a paragon of refinement, but lives music. That can be heard again in his unfeigned enthusiasm for the bitter-sweet cello sonatas of Dmitri Shostakovich and Alfred Schnittke, where he is energetically supported at the piano by Steven Osborne. Gerhardt enjoys a flowering phrase but also a breathy staccato, he plays with full tone and also knows how to whisper. But at all times he is master of the cello, oscillating miraculously between discipline and freedom
— Die Welt, Germany
Tracklisting
Dmitri Shostakovich
Sonata in D minor for cello and piano Op 40 (1934)
Allegro non troppo - Largo
Allegro
Largo
Allegro
Madrigal In Memoriam Oleg Kagan solo cello (1991) Lento
Klingende Buchstaben solo cello (1988)
Sonata No 1 for cello and piano (1978)
Largo
Presto
Largo
Dmitri Shostakovich
Die mechanische Puppe ‘The Clockwork Doll’ arr. Sapozhnikov
Drehorgel ‘Hurdy-Gurdy’ arr. Atovmian
Trauriges Lied ‘Sad Song’ arr. Kalianov
Wiegenlied 'Lullaby' arr. Kalianov
Frühlingswalzer ‘Spring Waltz’ arr. Atovmian
Nocturne from The Gadfly arr. Atovmian
Moderato
Gigue from Hamlet arr. Chelkauskas