Cello Sonata Op.69 (2002)

Con estrema intensità

One of the last musicians to defect from the Soviet Union – she was touring the USA as a teenage prodigy pianist at the time –    Lera Auerbach has had a phenomenally successful career, as both pianist and composer, since she settled in New York in 1991. Though clearly indebted to the leading Soviet (or ex-Soviet) composers of her time, Shostakovich and Schnittke, she has her own seriously passionate temperament and her own uninhibited, if not exactly progressive, musical language. The Cello Sonata she wrote for today’s performers, David Finckel and Wu Han, in 2002 is a particularly impressive examples of her work.

Auerbach began writing the piece while, she says, “reading Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian. Although there is no direct connection and the work is not programmatic, perhaps some of the imagery from Hesse’s novel may have infiltrated the writing, especially in the first movement where I thought of a dance of Abraxas, a mysterious god, who combines in himself both good and evil.” In fact, a basic duality, represented by the contrasting nature of the material awarded to the two instruments, persists throughout the work. The opening bars – violently rumbling octaves on the piano, a short but emotional protest on the cello – present the    two sides of the argument in condensed form. They are expressed in more extended terms when the piano invites the cello to introduce the eloquent main theme, unaccompanied at first except by its own double-stopped harmonies or left--hand pizzicato. They are at one in a 5/4 waltz sounding as if, the composer remarks, “from the depth of the past shadows have emerged.” The second main theme, “both dreamy and passionate,” is also introduced by the cello, which floats its line up to long-held harmonics high on the A-string. This leads into a vigorous fugal development. What recapitulation there is recalls the cello’s opening protest, now transformed into a vehement recitative, before the movement ends in a passage of sul ponticello colouring with a trilled glissando up to the very top of the cello range.

The duality is represented in the slow movement by a sustained, highly expressive lament on the cello while the piano is restricted to a chordal progression, almost as if in a passacaglia (and not without recalling the Louange à l’Eternité in Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps). Again the cello’s emotional intensity takes it high up the A-string in the closing bars. By way of an extreme contrast, the third movement is a violent toccata articulated by fierce syncopations but relieved by an exotically melodious Andante molto middle section which once more takes the cello on a rising trajectory through nasal sul ponticello colouring to a position high in its upper register.

“The last movement”, says the composer, “may be one of the most tragic pieces I have written.” Beginning with a prolonged passage of emphatic quartet-tone trills, it certainly reflects its Con estrema intensità heading, not least when the melodic line, punctuated by sharp stabs on the keyboard, takes the cellist’s left hand to the very end of the fingerboard before its slides down on a slow glissando. A return of the quarter-tone trills, this time molto sul ponticello, precedes a sonorous pizzicato soliloquy and an ending in which both instruments rise beyond the limits of their respective ranges and out of earshot. “Sometimes,” says Lear Auerbach, “it is possible, through pain and tragedy, to find lost beauty and meaning.”