by Daniel Hathaway
Chamber music recitals all too often follow the Chinese menu approach — one piece from Column A, one from Column B… Not so with the program the British cellist Steven Isserlis and Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein are touring with this month, which is fascinating for its choices and clever in its ordering of pieces. And this pair of musicians, who got together by accident but seem perfectly suited for one another, put it across brilliantly to the large Cleveland Chamber Music Society audience at Plymouth Church on Monday evening, an intergenerational crowd infused with young cellists, pianists and chamber musicians.
Here was the ground plan: both of Brahms’s cello sonatas, early and late, introduced by short pieces by Bartók and Busoni based on folk music and separated by two of Liszt’s late cello arrangements of his earlier songs. Liszt the revolutionary and Brahms the conservative didn’t get along at all during their lifetimes, but seemed as happily at ease with their proximity here as did Gerstein’s high-tech tablet computer (no page turner needed!) and Isserlis’s retro, gut-wound cello strings. [Read more…]
