Remember,
as a child at school learning an instrument, whether you
wanted to or not? Remember the time you had to put in on
various, boring, seemingly endless studies for every conceivable
thing imaginable – fingering, vibrato, keeping a line, the
quality of your sound production? The list goes on and on,
and it was sufficient torture to make many simply stop playing.
Others, however, relished the challenge and they progressed
onto bigger things and then to
real musical works.
At
Grammar School, as a 12 year old interested in classical
music, I started taking lessons on the cello. I had a good
teacher but I had neither the patience nor the interest for
the hours of practice necessary to make any real progress;
I never got past first position. Part of the problem, and
the same happened when I started to learn the piano, was
that I knew what the music should sound like but I could
never make my fingers do what my mind knew they had to do
to make the music work. The, to me, interminable Studies
of Carlo Alfredo Piatti brought my cello
playing days to a swift conclusion.
So,
with this still firmly in my mind, you can imagine my lack
of real excitement when I opened the box of CDs sent to me
for review and discovered a CD of cello studies. Then my
further dismay at discovering that it was
two CDs
of cello studies! If I were a drinking man I would have reached
for the gin bottle … and drunk it neat.
I
put off playing these CDs for quite some time, indeed, until
I could no longer avoid listening to them, if only to get
them out of the way so that my conscience was satisfied and
I could move on to some
real music.
So
imagine my surprise when I started listening and I discovered
something rather more than mere studies. I’m not saying that
I found forty undiscovered masterpieces, I certainly didn’t,
but what I did hear was some very exciting cello playing
and some very interesting music which, whilst designed to
strengthen the technique of the player, was bold and well
written in its own right. Keith Anderson, in his fine note
in the booklet, introduces each study to us, telling us what
it was designed to do – number 1 is a “study in triplets,
to be played with a loose wrist at the nut, slightly
staccato”,
while number number 32, to take another study at random, “contrasts
legato with
bowed staccato in its continuing semiquaver motion”.
I
am not going to list the use for each piece, life is too
short for that, suffice it for me to say that I really enjoyed
these miniatures – only six of them exceed three minutes
in duration. and Yablonsky plays
them as if they are
real music. Which they are!
How
often I would return to these CDs for repeated listening
I do not know but if you have any interest in music for cello,
and superb cello playing, this is a very interesting side-light
on 19
th century writing for that most mellow of
stringed instruments. In a way, this is quite a find.
Bob Briggs
Dmitry Yablonsky
(cello) 
