No sooner have I recovered
from a recent bout of Shafran Immersion
than I receive the latest release from
the Aulos stable, excellent bespoke
purveyors of the remastered Melodiya
catalogue. And what a release it is
– the most exhausting performance of
the Dvořák
to which I’ve ever listened. Not exhausting
as in enervating or preening – just
sheer exhausting. It’s a live performance
given in Moscow in 1980 and presided
over by something of a master Dvořákian,
Mariss Jansons.
The audience is well
behaved but the recording is rather
poor inasmuch as the acoustic is big
and unsubtle, the balance is not perfect
with the strings always covered by the
brass in the tuttis and the solo cello
seems sometimes to be in its own mini
echo chamber. But the playing .....
It opens quite slowly, building up anticipation.
Then Shafran enters with his granitic
chording and very uningratiating tone.
He employs a lot of portamenti, slows
markedly for the second subject, bleaches
his tone white for expressive effect
and generally engages in a welter of
emotive and suggestive gestures: extreme
diminuendi, great elasticity of phrasing
etc. The effect is one of constant change
and completely unsettled motion. The
most off-putting to those not initiated
in his art will be the on/off vibrato.
Admirer though I am I have to admit
that even I baulked at the excess of
it here. It’s a completely crushing
performance of the first movement.
If I was an unsympathetic
critic of Shafran I’d point to an excess
of the same in the second movement allied
to sentimental phrase endings, overheated
phrasing and the sense of vocalised
pain in the tone. Maybe some of these
are profounder virtues. Everything in
this performance is outsize and utterly
personal. No-one sounds remotely like
Shafran; his bowing is as individualized
as his tone in the finale, and his sense
of the terpsichorean is powerfully engaged,
as is the sense of constant flux. I
like the way Jansons brings out little
Tchaikovskian instrumentation as well,
even if his soloist can phrase rather
grandiloquently from time to time. The
weird, curdled passion Shafran evokes
in the reminiscence toward the end is
truly astonishing, the performance at
once profound, wilful, perverse and
sui generis. As I said, exhausting.
After which the Haydn
is almost normal. There are no great
surprises here, though the cadenzas
are overlong and Shafran indulges them
rather. He is nicely lyric in the slow
movement and employs a quick and luscious
slide or two in the finale. Nobody made
rules for Shafran. We end with a little
reminder of his fine partnership with
pianist Anton Ginsburg.
One
final thing; you may find yourself astonished
by Shafran’s Dvořák but you won’t
be half as astonished as the audience
sounds at the end. They clap like people
who have just sat through an
earthquake. As indeed, in a sense, they
have.
Jonathan Woolf
Daniil Shafran (cello) 
