A delicate imbalance undermines the Kanneh-Masons’ excellent playing at Carnegie Hall
Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason, chamber music’s most talked-about brother-sister duo since Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin, gave an advanced course in musical Romanticism, then and now, at Carnegie Hall Sunday afternoon.
The British cellist and pianist, both in their mid-20s, came at the Romantic era from both ends, with sonatas by the classically minded Felix Mendelssohn and the verging-on-modern Fauré and Poulenc. But the Romantic ethos itself was perhaps best represented by a piece composed not 150 years ago, but earlier this year.
The British violinist and composer Natalie Klouda wrote the two-movement work Tor Mordón expressly for the Kanneh-Masons, to commemorate the Welsh side of their family heritage and to express the awe one feels amid the craggy mountains and human legends of North Wales. The piece received its New York premiere Sunday.
Sheku and Isata are just the two most famous of seven siblings, all of them up-and-coming musicians, with family roots in Aruba, Wales and Sierra Leone. Whether it was countless hours of practice or sibling telepathy, or most likely both, their performance on Sunday was exceptionally woven together, as if by a single mind.
This quality might have been better appreciated in one of Carnegie’s smaller halls. (Probably not a viable idea, given the public interest in this duo.) For much of the concert, despite pianist Isata’s evident efforts to match her brother tonally, the concert grand with its lid up sounded far more present at all dynamic levels in the vast space of Stern Auditorium than Sheku’s cello. The merest hum of piano figurations was often enough to cover his part.
The effect was of hearing a “pianoforte sonata with cello accompaniment,” as such duo sonatas were called in the 18th century. While one could sit back and delight in Isata’s palette of tone colors and technical wizardry, it took an effort to focus now and then on Sheku, and realize that he was matching her, phrase for phrase and run for run. Occasionally one could readily hear the peer-to-peer give-and-take of chamber music, but not often enough.
So there’s an aspect of woulda-shoulda to the rest of this review, as we consider what we might have heard in these performances under more favorable conditions. There’s not much one can do about the blizzard of notes typical of Mendelssohn’s piano parts—the first and last movements of his Cello Sonata No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 45, would feature the pianist’s fleet fingers in any case, with the cello riding along in shapely phrases, occasionally firing off a fast scale of its own.
The sonata’s central Andante brought lightly dancing chords and watery cascades from the piano, with the cello emerging now and then with an elegantly turned phrase or a passionate punctuation. The cello was able to assert itself in the finale, which was rich in tunes and clattering with piano octaves before it surprisingly wound down to a vanishing pianissimo finish.
A lyrical composer loved for his songs and choral works, Fauré was not untouched by the horrors of World War I and the modernist response in the arts, as one can hear in his Cello Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 109. The pair brought out the volatile character of the first movement, opening in a rhapsodic burst but slipping quickly into darker regions, deftly negotiating turbulent passagework in shifting rhythms.
The Andante unfolded in a hush, the pianist’s delicately voiced chords interacting with the cellist’s questing line in a steady but relaxed tempo. Actually is was the finale that was marked “comfortable” (Allegro comodo), but in Sunday’s performance there was an urgency to its ripples and scales, as cello and piano took turns with a long-breathed theme. The fluid figurations, open-ended harmonies and flashing, etude-like coda showed the old Romantic helping himself to the innovations of Debussy.
Klouda’s Tor Mordón was a rangy piece in familiar triadic harmonies, opening in a swirl of mist, then climbing to the sunlit peaks of the Eryri (Snowdonia) district, as described in the composer’s program note. Ecstatic contrasts of tempo and dynamics, activity and stillness, accompanied the journey.
In the second and final movement, inspired by exotic and violent Welsh folktales, Bartók and Stravinsky seemed to be looking over Isata’s shoulder as she pounded out the barbaric rhythms and flashed lightning in the high treble. Sheku responded in kind, then joined his sister in the furious crescendo to a fiery coda. During the bows, the composer joined the artists onstage to bask in the enthusiastic applause.
Civilization returned in the form of Poulenc’s Cello Sonata, with its jaunty, extroverted first theme for the piano, followed by a stretchy cello theme played with just the right amount of swoopy portamento. The Cavatine movement was one of those stop-you-in-your-tracks Poulenc moments, when the witty fellow at the dinner table has you suddenly thinking about life’s questions, as the piano chimed subtly voiced chords in the treble and the cello climbed slowly up to meet it.
The scherzo-like third movement was marked Ballabile, “danceable” (sure, if you’re Baryshnikov), and the Kanneh-Masons brought both a light touch and animal spirits to the spiky outer sections and the more tuneful middle—with extra sparkle by Isata at the piano.
The finale’s percussive piano sounds and faux-naïve triadic harmony put one in mind of Prokofiev, but the cello countered with a suave phrase here, agile leaps and scales there, until the granitic forte coda capped the afternoon’s program with a bang.
The artists responded to the audience’s standing applause with a single encore, and a seasonal one, no less: Gustav Holst’s Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter,” with brilliant and clever variations by the Kanneh-Masons themselves. And in this afterthought to the scheduled program, piano and cello finally shared the acoustic spotlight equally.
Carnegie Hall presents cellist Alisa Weilerstein in “FRAGMENTS 2,” the second in a series of multimedia performances matching new works with Bach cello suites, Jan. 21 at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. carnegiehall.org
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