Cello Sonata No.1 (1978)

There could be no more sincere tribute from a composer to an instrumentalist than Alfred Schnittke’s dedication of his First Cello Sonata to Natalia Gutman. The cellist did not commission it and she actually knew nothing about it until it was presented it to her, as a surprise, in 1978. A great admirer of Gutman’s playing - he was also to dedicate his First Cello Concerto to her and the Concerto Grosso No.2 jointly to her and her late husband Oleg Kagan - Schnittke entrusted her here with all kinds of responsibilities including, most flatteringly, an inspired example of the long-sustained slow finale which is such a distinctive feature of his work.

The closing Largo is, in fact, the be-all as well as the end-all. The opening Largo is a preparation for it - a comparatively short, though by no means cramped, anticipation of its expressive melodic material and its intense way of thought. While the piano remains silent, the cello sets the emotional scene, adding a dimension to its eloquent line by touching in harmonies on the lower strings and emphasising a significant phrase by means of a timely pizzicato. The piano makes only three entries, the first of which introduces a surreal allusion to what just might be a theme from Winterreise. The other piano entries, which follow a prolonged silence towards the middle of the movement, frame a particularly impassioned cello recitative between two fragmentary chorales.

Following directly on the quiet ending of the first movement, the Presto makes an impression at least as dramatic as the most violent of Shostakovich scherzos. It begins with the cello on the run pursued, some bars later, by a grotesquely monstrous piano which proves to have a dangerous turn of speed, with the result that the two instruments proceed in parallel at one point, provoking a pathetic whimper from the cello. The danger seems to recede but the cello is set into another panic and the chase goes on. There is no respite until, after a brutally applied chord cluster on the piano and a protest of double-stopped pizzicato on the cello, the moto perpetuo piano figuration spins right off the top end of the keyboard.

The closing Largo follows without a break and, appropriately enough after the violence of the intervening Presto, in an even more emotional state than the opening Largo. Although, like the rest of the work, it is serially organised, and although it is constructed in such a way as to make significant features of memories from the two preceding movements, it is a deeply heartfelt inspiration motivated quite spontaneously, it seems, according to its own instincts. The tragic mood of the piece is clear from the bitter sound of the first piano chord and the lamenting voice of the cello high above it. That relationship between the two instruments - one expressing its anguish in stabs of harmonic colour, the other in linear terms - is sustained until the piano recalls the bleak allusion to Winterreise (if that is what it is) and the cello develops it. Although the colours and the textures are varied, by a piano tremolando perhaps or a passage of plucked strings below high-placed dissonances on the piano, the cello remains the dominant voice as passion subsides and the pitch level gradually sinks to its lowest level. From then on, it is largely a matter of quiet reflection, the piano looking back first, then the cello in gently strummed pizzicato. There is just one brief resurgence of cello grief before, as at the end of the previous movement, the piano figuration spins off the upper end of the keyboard.

Gerald Larner©2002