San Francisco Classical Voice

RECITAL REVIEW

Bold to a Fault?

April 10, 2005

Matt Haimovitz

By John Lutterman

Cellist Matt Haimovitz is at his best in music of large proportions, and when he is at his best, he is very good indeed. His strong personality, warm, fat sound, and fondness for powerful, dramatic gestures are quite popular with audiences, and these traits were given full rein in Sunday afternoon's recital at Kandar Hall. In the more substantial works on the program Haimovitz's approach served the music well, but he seemed much less at home in the more intimate character pieces of Schumann's Five Pieces in Folkstyle and Beethoven's "Bei Männern" Variations.

In the Schumann, which began the program, many of the quicksilver changes of mood and subtle rhythmic ambiguities were lost, and things just seemed a bit askew. The witty opening movement, which is marked "Mit humor" and playfully toys with a gypsy tune, seemed awfully serious; and the simple lines of the second movement lullaby were broken up by a constant portato and a rather mannered vibrato. The third movement is indeed marked "Nicht schnell" (Not fast), but Haimovitz's performance felt ponderous and labored; not that the tempo was actually too slow, but lack of a clear sense of direction made it seem so. He seemed to find his stride by the end, though; his intonation in the high double-stopped passages was impressive, and the last two movements were much more convincing.

Balance with his partner, pianist Jean Marchand, was a problem through much of the program. The acoustics in Kandar are a bit dry, which can make it difficult for a cellist to project, but while his sound was sometimes strained, especially during those passages in which he should have been playing accompanist, for the most part Haimovitz compensated nicely. A big part of the problem was that the piano was simply too far back on the stage, and as a result sounded rather dull. Since all of the works on Haimovitz's program were true duos for cello and piano, it seemed odd to put the pianist in such a subservient position. It may have been a matter of his relegation to an accompanist's role, but Marchand's musical personality seemed a bit drab in comparison with his partner's, and I missed any sense of urgency from the piano lines, especially in Schumann's wonderful little character pieces, works that embody several very strong personalities.

The Hungarian element

Haimovitz's reading of Bartók's challenging First Rhapsody was first-rate, served up with his usual self-assured bravura, but with plenty of attention to subtle details, including some wonderful colors in the high positions on the lower strings of his instrument, a magnificent Gofriller. A sonata for unaccompanied cello by György Ligeti was substituted for Bartók's popular Rumanian Folk Dances, which had originally been programmed to follow the Schumann. Cast in two movements, a ruminating "Dialogo" and a whirlwind perpetual-motion "Capriccio," the Sonata, composed early in Ligeti's career but only recently published, is a worthy addition to the vast repertoire of twentieth-century pieces for solo cello, and Haimovitz's performance certainly made a good case for the work.

Like most of Beethoven's works published without opus numbers, the "Bei Männern" Variations (on an aria from Mozart's Magic Flute) were aimed at the amateur-performers' market. Unlike his two earlier sets of variations for cello and piano, the "Bei Männern" Variations introduce some sense of parity between the roles of the instruments, though the piano still has the lion's share of work to do. There is also a more sophisticated large-scale structure, with a new sense of dramatic development from variation to variation, each of which seems to look at Papageno's character from a different point of view. The comic quality here is simple, but clever. Although there is plenty of slapstick melodrama, there are also moments of great poignancy, and each short variation captures an individual personality from Mozart's multifaceted opera. Haimovitz handled the more poignant slow variations nicely, but his approach to the witty characters in the faster variations was a bit heavy-handed, especially his tendency to beat final cadences to death.

The program ended on a much better note, though, with Shostakovich's D minor Sonata, a work that suited Haimovitz's talents admirably. According to Haimovitz, the first and last movements of the Sonata include material borrowed from a couple of Shostakovich's film scores; an anecdote I had not heard before. Apparently material for the first movement came from a war-era propaganda film, and much of the last movement is supposed to have originated in an animated short of a barroom scene featuring a drunkard scampering about in a futile attempt to hide from his irate spouse, a scene that culminates in a vigorous slap. I have not yet been able to verify this anecdote, but Haimovitz's playing was certainly imaginative, and I have rarely heard a more compelling performance.