This programme was
originally issued on Marco Polo 8 223403
and is now reissued on Marco Polo’s
stablemate Naxos. The recordings may
be fifteen years old, but they come
up with great freshness. Kliegel has
made many recordings for Naxos in the
intervening years – from Bach to Gubaidulina,
Beethoven to Tavener, to name but a
few. Most of these recordings have deservedly
won much praise. Kliegel is a sensitive
musician and a consummate technician.
Shortly before receiving
this disc I had, by chance, been reading
an interview Kliegel gave to Tin Janoff
which has been posted on the website
of the Internet Cello Society (http://www.cello.org/Newsletter/Articles/kliegel.htm).
In it Kleiegel has much to say about
studying with Janos Starker, about masterclasses
with Rostropovich, about playing Bach
and much else. I recommend the interview
to all with an interest in the cello.
In the course of it Kliegel explains
why she is keen to play some contemporary
works and not others: "The piece
has to be written such that the cello
still sounds like a cello. I don't like
those pieces where I'm only allowed
to play scratchy quartertones. There
can be heartfelt ugly-sounding moments
that express pain, struggle, or other
human feelings, but there has to be
beauty too. Alfred Schnittke's and Sofia
Gubaidulina's music expresses this beautifully.
If the soul of the cello is not recognizable,
I refuse to play it, no matter how great
its concept or how profound the underlying
philosophy may be."
The music played in
this programme from 1990 is actually
rather short on great concepts or profound
philosophy, but in the performance of
much of it we can certainly recognise
"the soul of the cello" -
if not the greatest depths of that soul.
Kliegel’s programme
is well chosen and planned in the way
it mixes familiar and unusual, fast
and slow, complex and simple. It’s more
than a mere collection of cello lollipops.
And the playing is tremendous. It would
take much too long to enumerate all
the pleasures to be had here. They include
the playful macabre of Cassado’s Dance
of the Green Devil, the bravura performance
of ‘The Bee’ from the Dresden Schubert’s
Twelve Bagatelles and the pizzicato
of Barchet’s Boulevard de Menton.
Kliegel plays the transcription from
Gershwin, which closes the programme,
with wholly idiomatic panache. In short,
there isn’t a dud in the programme –
though I usually find that a little
David Popper goes a long way and confess
that even Kliegel couldn’t entirely
hold my interest through the more than
eleven minutes of his Fantasy on
Little Russian Songs.
Raymond Havenith is
an excellent accompanist, sympathetic
and intelligent throughout.
It is always tempting
to be a little sniffy about this kind
of programme of encores – but it is
a temptation I found easy to resist
in this particular case. Recommended.
Glyn Pursglove
See also the reviews by Göran
Forsling and Patrick
Waller