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Signum4
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Bridge2
I love artists who attempt the impossible. Within reason, that is. I’d draw the line at someone playing the 32 Beethoven sonatas one-handed, or the 15 Shostakovich quartets without a bathroom break. But any artist who takes a piece of music beyond the limits of what I’d heard in it before gets my vote.
The American cellist Zlatomir Fung has composed a fantasy on Janacek’s opera Jenufa, a feat that defies credibility. The tunes and rhythms of Jenufa are rooted in Czech speech patterns. Erase the voice, and what’s left? An X-ray. Fung and his pianist Richard Fu present fifteen minutes of skeletal examination in which not only the sounds but the tensions of Janacek’s masterpiece are grippingly realised. I can hardly believe that what they have done here is doable. I need to hear it live.
The other transcriptions on the album – Fille du Regiment, William Tell, Meistersinger and Onegin – are several degrees less astonishing, and the Carmen is a car-crash. But just listen to that Jenufa.
For a man so precise in his intentions, Stephen Sondheim was open to having his works rearranged for smaller groups. The most effective reduction was Sweeney Todd, played and sung by just nine musicians on a pocket-handkerchief stage. What Eric Stern has done in this reset is to shrink key works to violin and piano, with occasional cello and two voices. A Little Night Music works best in this form, followed by ‘Every day a little death’ and ‘Not While I’m around’.
William Terwilliger (violin) and Andrew Cooperstock (piano) have perfect pitch in Sondheim idiom but the singers lack whimsy and the ear cries out for greater variety. String quartet, maybe? I am waiting to be astonished.
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