Delicate flickering, almost endlessly sliding sound surfaces that move gently and shift up and down, dynamically swell and ebb. In this finely crafted undulation, the violoncello sails along lonely, sometimes soaring up to lengthy top-note sequences or abandoning itself meditatively to the swaying orchestra. But no sea is without eddies and currents, without surf and spray. So the cello plunges into its low strings, starts raging, panting, jumping before it finally climbs back onto those almost spherically moving sound surfaces on which it blows in the solar wind with the widest perspective, so to speak.
Anders Hillborg, born in 1954, is one of Sweden’s best-known composers with worldwide resonance. His Cello Concerto invites you to make such associations with nature, and also to think about cosmic expanses . The soloist sways and snuggles into it in apparently free movements in all directions. Hillborg created this piece for the German-French cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, born in 1982, written by a musician who is absolutely hungry for expression, whose tone is strongly under bow pressure and rarely finds that relaxed, gliding along or even the weightlessness of pure sound beauty that is desired here. In any case, that was the overwhelming impression at the German premiere of Hillborg’s concerto in Munich’s Isarphilharmonie, which was a unanimous success for all those involved in the presence of the composer and was applauded vigorously.
The Munich Philharmonic, however, offered Hillborg’s sound surface gliding music under the light-handed, yet always very attentive and excellent director Krzysztof Urbanski so glistening in the tonal structure and gently dazzlingly aimed at the endless play of sound ebb and flow, as the composer probably imagined. Altstaedt, on the other hand, acted as a kind of opponent as a soloist, following his expressive nature, so that the danger of any lack of tension between the orchestra and the soloist was certainly averted by Altstaedt’s idea. Anyway, in the end composer and player hugged happily. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen what forms of realization cellists of a different persuasion than the dedicatee will discover in this immediately accepted music. All in all, after this first performance one might think of a bon mot by Gustav Mahler, who once maliciously commented on Claude Debussy’s music that it was not disturbing.
The beauty of cello singing is immediately apparent when a cellist knows how to portray the rapidly changing states of mind
Previously, Altstaedt had offered a completely different piece for cello and orchestra, in which violent emotional outbursts, melodic lines to be sung passionately, immediate sweetness of the tone, dark musings and painful longing are required, i.e. a drama of conflicting, impulsively arousing and hardly ever calming emotions . Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s cello concerto, composed in 1946, forms the center of the dark Hollywood melodrama “Deception” (“Tügerische Passion”), which focuses on the great Bette Davis between two musicians tormented by jealousy, here the domineering composer and conductor Alexander Hollenius, hauntingly portrayed by Claude Rains, there the sensitive cellist Karel Novak, shaken by his love, played by Paul Henreid.
Korngold wrote the music for the film. He removed the Cello Concerto from this context and expanded it for the concert hall. The storms of emotion, the poison of lies, the incurable escalation of rivalry and the beauty of cello singing have an immediate effect when a cellist knows how to portray the rapidly changing states of mind. Urbanski and the Philharmoniker offered a darkly shimmering soundscape, in which Altstaedt, however, despite all the expressiveness and intensity, was all too rough and not rich in timbre in tone, often pulling the bow and growling in the bass. In any case, Korngold’s cello concerto, which is as brief as it is stirring, belongs on the program much more often.
Before and after these encounters between two cello worlds that are so very different, yes, opposite and precisely therein captivating, Krzysztof Urbanski, who is as excellent as he is committed to the orchestra, conducted “Don Juan” and “Till Eugenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” by Richard Strauss, two virtuoso pieces for large orchestra, which at this level of realization leave nothing but enthusiasm.