Differing Shades of Lyricism Cello Sonatas by Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev
Gavin Plumley
It was Mstislav Rostropovich, the inspiration for the work by Sergei Prokofiev heard tonight and the performer at its premiere, who came closest to describing the unique sound of the cello. It had a voice, he maintained, that was tenorial in quality and therefore profoundly heroic in nature. Certainly, the cello occupies that richest, most human part of the register, inspiring so many lyrical works, as witnessed throughout Pablo Ferrández and Denis Kozhukhin’s program. But the roots of that lyricism are more complex to define than a simple case of cello’s cause and composers’ effect. After all, the idiom found in Prokofiev’s Sonata, composed in 1949, may well be a cautious response to the Zhdanov Decrees of the late 1940s, in which Stalin’s cultural envoy had detailed a list of musical crimes that Prokofiev, like all of his composing colleagues, would have to avoid. Johannes Brahms and Sergei Rachmaninoff were, thankfully, composing in easier times, at least politically speaking. The lyricism of Brahms’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in F major, written during a summer vacation on Lake Thun in Switzerland in 1886, speaks of the enduring influence of the contralto Hermine Spies, who visited Brahms there and whose voice breathes through the lines of this work. Brahms’s yearning for Hermine would not, ultimately, lead to happiness, but the longing tones that characterize so much of Rachmaninoff ’s Cello Sonata find their way to triumph. This was not an amorous conclusion but an artistic one, as the composer vanquished former ghosts with a sequence of successful premieres at the beginning of the 20th century.
