ENESCU PROKOFIEV SHOSTAKOVICH SONATAS LAURA BURUIANA CELLO ALEXANDRA SILOCEA PIANO George Enescu 1881–1955 1 Cello Sonata in F minor – Allegro 9.06 Sergei Prokofiev 1891–1953 Cello Sonata in C Op.119 2 I. Andante grave 10.08 3 II. Moderato 4.23 4 III. Allegro, ma non troppo 7.18 Dmitri Shostakovich 1906–1975 Cello Sonata in D minor Op.40 5 I. Allegro non troppo – Largo 10.48 6 II. Allegro 3.13 7 III. Largo 6.59 8 IV. Allegro 4.01 56.11 Laura Buruiana cello · Alexandra Silocea piano Recording: 3–6 September 2013, Église protestante de Bon Secours, Paris, France Recording producer & engineer: Sébastien Chonion Editing, mixing and mastering: Sébastien Chonion Piano: Steinway D 589079 Piano tuner/technician: Helmut Klemm Artist photos: Ben Ealovega Design: Jeremy Tilston for WLP Ltd. ൿ 2015 The copyright in this sound recording is owned by Laura Buruiana and Alexandra Silocea Ꭿ 2015 Laura Buruiana and Alexandra Silocea www.lauraburuiana.com www.alexandra-silocea.com Marketed by Avie Records www.avie-records.com DDD 2 Shostakovich · Prokofiev: Cello Sonatas ‘You will, I am sure, live long enough to see that Shostakovich and Prokofiev are and have been the best composers of our time.’ So claimed record producer Walter Legge in a letter to the writer Peter Heyworth quoted in On and Off the Record (1982). Was Legge being deliberately provocative in the course of a prickly exchange concerning the inescapably Teutonic legacy of Otto Klemperer? Here were two composers who, in their different ways, willingly or unwillingly, kept the flag flying for lower norms of dissonance and older ways of thinking generally overlooked by modernist critics in the West. Today even relatively unassuming pieces like their respective cello sonatas find a central place in the repertoire. Dazzlingly conceived for the solo instrument, neither is a work of Sturm und Drang. Nor in the case of the Shostakovich sonata at least can the softening of temper be related to external political pressure. To assume that either man composed ‘for’ or ‘against’ the system was always too simple. In 1934 Shostakovich had other priorities, not least of which was the temporary collapse of his first marriage. To those insisting on biographical rationalisations, Shostakovich’s response to the emotional turmoil may seem surprising. In the ideological calm between the successful unveiling of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera he dedicated to his first wife Nina, and its official condemnation two years later, he embarked on his most poised and classical composition to date. It may have been politically prudent for Shostakovich to cite the influence of Maxim Gorky’s articles on the ‘purity of language’, but how fascinating to discover so much of the Fifth Symphony’s more circumspect style and ‘purged’ harmonic vocabulary anticipated in the Cello Sonata’s four movements. The work was undertaken at the suggestion of long-term supporter Viktor Lubatsky, the Bolshoi Theatre’s former principal cellist, who gave the first performance, accompanied by the composer, on 25 December 1934. In later years Shostakovich was unable to do justice to the unusually prominent and complicated piano part intended for his younger self, although it is the lyrical content that stakes out unexpected territory. The lovely opening melody of the Allegro non troppo could almost be by Fauré, the second tending towards Rachmaninov. Less surprising to contemporary listeners would have been the brisk, energetic scherzo (originally paced as a minuet). The darker, rawer espressivo of the Largo is a pointer to Shostakovich’s mature development, whereas the concluding Allegro comes closer to the sardonic slapstick of his early ballets and the First Piano Concerto. Beethoven at his more irascible and Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony are somewhere in the mix too. The original score, published in 1935, differs markedly from the Muzyka edition, which has faster metronome markings and tempo indications. These may arise from Shostakovich’s experience of playing and recording the work (a second time) with the great Mstislav Rostropovich, although, as the latter remembered, ‘his chief concern was to get the recording finished as quickly as possible; it was a beautiful day and he couldn’t wait to join his friends and down a glass of vodka’. Until late in life Prokofiev displayed no special partiality for the cello. Among his earliest compositions is a Ballade (1912), which sounds like a piano work with cello accompaniment. There followed, in the 1930s, an awkward, occasionally unplayable Cello Concerto written at the behest of Gregor Piatigorsky. The material achieved its definitive form in the Symphony-Concerto or Sinfonia concertante (1950–51, revised 1952), a vehicle for Rostropovich, but then Prokofiev’s unexpected focus on the cello seems to have been very largely a product of his admiration for and 3 unconventional friendship with the 20-year-old cellist. The master–pupil dynamic was turned on its head by the terrible events of 1948. Lina, Prokofiev’s estranged wife and the mother of his children, was arrested and shipped off to the gulag just as Andrei Zhdanov began ratcheting up the so-called anti-Formalism campaign against the Soviet Union’s foremost composers. Already in precarious health, Prokofiev was suddenly persona non grata, living a simple rural life in the dacha he could no longer afford, while the dazzling young cellist was much in favour and moreover prepared to intervene with the authorities on the composer’s behalf. Rostropovich has left a colourful description of his first visit to Prokofiev’s home in Nikolina Gora. ‘As we drove into the gates … I saw Prokofiev coming towards us. He was wearing a raspberry-coloured dressing gown and had a towel tied turban-like on his head. Behind him ran a batch of clucking chicks and cockerels; evidently he had just been feeding them.’ Thereafter the two men spent much time together exploring the cello’s technical and expressive potential. Prokofiev had decided to write the C major Cello Sonata (1949) after hearing Rostropovich perform Myaskovsky’s new Second Cello Sonata. Passages like the coda of the first movement (in which virtuosic bell-like arpeggios retreat into shimmering harmonics) could perhaps be called a collaborative effort. Like the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, the cello has the first few bars to itself, surging romantically from the depths of the C string. A more unsettling, residually modernist element is introduced into the innocuous piano writing, the protagonist responding with slashing pizzicato chords. Thereafter the music is not quite carefree with lyrical and active elements counterpoised throughout the three movements, in ways that foreground the singing tone and latent dexterity of the cello. The work culminates in dramatic Rostropovich-inspired pyrotechnics and a final insistence on C major sunlight. As with Shostakovich’s mature work, so in Prokofiev’s: opinions differ about the extent to which he might have been signalling dissent even via such predominantly lyrical, ostensibly ‘tame’ invention. The line from Gorky inscribed on the first page of his manuscript – ‘Man! That has a proud sound’ – seems a suitably Soviet sentiment, and/or a tribute to Rostropovich’s life-affirming musicianship. Then again, the play from which it derives, The Lower Depths (1902) can yield a more nihilistic reading, its characters slowly coming to terms with their marginalisation and the indifference of the universe. Ꭿ David Gutman, 2015 4 Enescu’s lost cello sonata George Enescu was born in 1881 in Romania. By the time he was eight, Enescu had left his home country and moved to Vienna to pursue his musical education. In 1895, he won a place at the famous Paris Conservatoire, where he had the opportunity to study composition with Fauré and Massenet and violin with Joseph Joachim. During these early Parisian musical years, Enescu composed the Sonata in F minor for cello and piano. This work has no opus number. The F minor Sonata was published in Cluj-Napoca (Transylvania). It was originally intended to be the first movement of the Cello Sonata No.1 Op.26, also in F minor and composed in the same year (1898), but Enescu eventually changed his mind and rewrote the first movement of Op.26. Nevertheless, the second subject is kept almost identical in both sonatas. The manuscript of this one-movement sonata was rediscovered by the composer Hans-Peter Türk in 1988. Türk also completed the sonata (Enescu had stopped at bar 217 of 231). As with most of the piano works that Enescu composed before he turned 30, the piano part of the sonata is technically very demanding. The unison passages also represent a significant challenge. Enescu would go on to write masterpieces such as the opera Œdipe and the First Symphony, and this cello sonata is a showcase for the young composer’s potential. I hope that this recording will bring the sonata the recognition from musicians and audiences that it deserves. Ꭿ Laura Buruiana, 2015 Schostakowitsch · Prokofieff: Cellosonaten „Sie werden, da bin ich mir sicher, lange genug leben, um feststellen zu können, dass Schostakowitsch und Prokofieff die besten Komponisten unserer Zeit sind und waren.“ Dies schrieb der Plattenproduzent Walter Legge in einem in On and Off the Record (1982) zitierten Brief an den Schriftsteller Peter Heyworth. Zeigte sich Legge im Rahmen eines leicht gereizten Briefwechsels über die unzweifelhaft teutonische Ausrichtung der von Otto Klemperer aufgezeichneten Werksauswahl absichtlich provokant? Die beiden genannten Komponisten hatten auf unterschiedliche Weise, willkürlich oder unabsichtlich, die Flagge für weniger Dissonanz sowie traditionellere, generell von westlichen modernistischen Kritikern geschmähte Denkweisen gehisst. Heute nehmen sogar relativ bescheidene Stücke wie ihre jeweiligen Cellosonaten einen zentralen Platz im Repertoire ein. Beide Sonaten sind zwar brillante Kompositionen für das Soloinstrument, jedoch keine Werke des Sturms und Drangs.