San Francisco Classical Voice

The arrival of a fine instrumentalist for a single San Francisco recital causes a critical stir, but a brilliant player can settle into a full-time job at the San Francisco Conservatory without much of a flutter in the press. Clive Greensmith, who joined the Conservatory's faculty in Fall 1998, made more waves in leaving his position (for one in the Tokyo Quartet) than he ever did in gaining it. And Greensmith's successor, Jean-Michel Fonteneau, seems to have eased into his new job with as little fanfare--although at last Monday's Conservatory recital, the back of the hall was littered with cello cases.

Keen expectations were raised by Fonteneau's impressive playing in the Ravel Trio on Ian Swensen's recital program a week earlier. Monday's program was clearly designed to showcase the full range of the cellist's talents, and while the recital hinted at a few limitations, it fully confirmed the impression of an agile and individual musical intellect given in his Ravel performance.

Fonteneau played Bach's C-major Suite with a sure left hand and an elegant bow-arm. To a listener familiar with the graceful gestures of baroque playing, the interpretation might have seemed a little stodgy, but it was well within the bounds of good taste. The other solo work on the program, Dutilleux' Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher, demanded a rather more active technique and moreover, a second, different cello whose lower strings were tuned to pitches other than the standard C and G. Fonteneau gave a charming introduction to the work beforehand, and then dug into it with startling force.

Beethoven's two late cello sonatas, Op. 102, are a bit of an embarrassment. Terse, abrupt, and cryptic, they don't have the prestige of the late piano sonatas or the late quartets, and most cellists are happiest sticking with the lyrical Op. 69 and, in a pinch, the two Op. 5s. Fonteneau chose the late C-major Sonata, Op. 102, No. 1 , and while he and pianist Paul Hersh didn't quite make the odd little piece make sense, they did make beautiful things of the slow first and third movements.

The remaining two pieces on the program showed the cellist at his best. Schumann's Op. 73 Fantasiestücke were meant for clarinet, but Fonteneau and Hersh really did, in the reviewer's cliché, make one "forget the clarinet." Fonteneau's rich, mellow sound and minutely attentive phrasing went beyond anything any clarinetist could do. And Hersh tracked him expertly, with a degree of finesse one would have expected of a decades-long partnership.

But it was the Debussy sonata that crowned the recital, as one might have expected. Fonteneau's depth of sound and gravity of manner gave the first movement the ritual air that it demands. The skittish second movement was a vivid play of gestures, seemingly spontaneous, but precisely coordinated between cello and piano. Fonteneau showed himself here, as elsewhere, a magnificent chamber player; he was alert at every instant to Hersh's playing, and passages in unison really did seem to be played by a single mind.

The finale asks a lot of the cellist, and making the highest of Debussy's lines sing to the utmost requires a power towards the top of the A string that Fonteneau didn't really have. Still, it was a marvelous performance, full of rhetorical skill and coloristic finesse, and the movement was deservedly encored.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved