San Francisco Classical Voice

RECITAL REVIEW Grace Even In Fury, But Always In Control
February 6, 2002

By Michelle Dulak

It would not be entirely fair to divide the world's string players into the strong and the suave, since all the best are both. But for all that there do seem to be two camps — the suavely strong and the strongly suave, if you like. One character is always the adjective, and the other the noun; one the modifier, and the other the fact. Half tame their power into a sort of lyricism; the other half force their lyricism into a sort of power.

Competitions tend to favor the former kind of player, the kind where the elegant velvety sound is on top and the adamantine bravura is at the center. But sometimes, happily, the other sort slips through to prominence, especially in a competition like the Naumburg, where chamber and recital playing is the focus. Certainly the young cellist Liwei Qin, who won the Naumburg Competition in 2001 and gave his San Francisco debut recital at Herbst last Wednesday night, is a musician in whom elegance, fluidity, and grace are the core.

Liwei Qin began his recital with a Boccherini sonata that showed his cantilena off almost to too great effect. The heady sound overwhelmed the music rather; I can remember the timbre and the exquisite details of phrasing, but not much of the substance of the music. That's a reasonable way of playing Boccherini (the sonatas, anyway; the bigger chamber music has too much going on in it for any details to be swallowed up in luscious sound); but for Beethoven it begins to miss the point. Liwei Qin and Jeremy Young (the excellent pianist for the whole recital) played the last Beethoven Sonata, Op. 102/2, and here I thought the elegance was beginning to get in the way of the music. This sonata is weirder than this duo let on.

Magnificent solo playing

The little Ligeti solo sonata that came between the Boccherini and the Beethoven suggested a different aspect of the cellist, one with a healthy measure of grit in it, but the Kodaly solo sonata was another order of playing entirely. The piece is a monstrous challenge almost unequalled in the 20th-century cello repertory — vast, craggy, ridiculously strenuous in its technical demands (quiet demands like tremolando and left-hand pizzicato as much as the more obvious ones), and throwing on top of it all a scordatura tuning, so that playing on the bottom two strings of the instrument involves rethinking the location of every note. It is furious music, and furiously difficult.

Liwei Qin's playing was masterly. It did not sound easy everywhere; it was a good deal better than that. It sounded difficult in the relatively easy places, and easy in the truly difficult ones. That sense of strain that really ought to be there with very high playing on the cello (even if the cellist could do it in his sleep) was there. That sense of strain that fatally undermines an effect like Kodaly's tremolando, and that is all but impossible to avoid, wasn't there. The perfect control was let slip, not where an ordinary player really would slip, but where a atmosphere of struggle made sense in the piece. It must be unnerving to have control like that.

That the imperfect mastery was an illusion was brought home by the Schumann Adagio and Allegro that ended the written program, a piece originally written for horn but picked up by reckless cellists on Schumann's OK. I've never heard a cellist get through this awkward, ungainly, wretchedly-difficult piece with such ease and grace, such untroubled line and such joy.

As encore was Kreisler's "Liebesleid," the suave spirit in full force.

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