ESSAY ON FATE AND GRACE
Let's for the fun of it pretend I need to defend the transcribers cause, in this case Davidov's Chopin adaptations. Or shall I start with thanking him for precisely that, for choosing Chopin's piano waltzes for transcription, because what might seem an unlikely choice turns out to be such a completely blissful one?
Maybe I'll begin with a bit of playful, defensive manouvering. First of all we can safely say that the cello was very dear to Chopin. Three out of his five chamber music works are for cello and piano: the expansive sonata, the delightful Grand Duo Concertante, written together with his friend the cellist August Franchomme and the Polonaise Brilliante. Also, in his piano works he often seems to try to evoke a cello sound, which explains nicknames for piano pieces such as 'cello prelude' or 'cello etude' that circulate among pianists.
Secondly, apart from being a stupendous innovator of piano technique and a revolutionary as far as style and harmony are concerned, Chopin should be considered as one of the melodic geniuses of the 19th century. Sometimes one wonders whether the power of his music doesn't lie more in its lyricism than in the drama of its outbursts, the vulcanism, the storms of virutosity or its refined pianism. Whatever his temperament comes up with, this enormous array of moods, from the fatalistic to the ecstatic, from the destructive to the all-embracing, he seems to be able to find melodic expression for everything. His lyrical vocabulary seems endlessly resourceful, producing passionate, vulnerable and elegant melodies, full of emotion and sometimes just simply ravishing.
Now for the best defence: Attack! If we took one of those melodies, say a left hand theme from a piano piece, a theme pianists would call a cello melody, then a pianist would try to play the melody 'cellistically', imagining the sound of a cello. If a cellist were to play that same tune, he would in his effort to imitate a singer, have a baritone's voice in his mind. What would happen though if we were to give that melody (plus a text) to a singer? Wouldn't he also, with some sort of neo-platonic intentions, try to transport his listeners beyond his instrument, his voice (and even the text)? At his place in the chain that would mean straight into spiritual realms.
But then, text, voice and instruments, are they not all mere ladders to that higher goal? Isn't all music making essentially an act of sublimation, of symbolism, of bringing the unattainable into reach? On the other hand, there is no sublimation without seduction, no elation without the physical pleasure of music making. Most of the time one simply can't tell from which element the esctacy of a great musical experience stems, from the subliminal or the playful and the sensual.
If we agree we hereby have isolated the two essential musical elements, pure play and pure spirit, seemingly at the two ends of music's spectrum, but both inseparably at work when good music comes to life, surely we can then also identify them as the two major green lights for the transcriber.
Or marching in from a different angle: of course Chopin's music is full of idiomatic piano writing, specially in the passages that more or less rely on virtuosity. In the more cantabile passages there is this fabulous finesse and sophistication to make the listener forget we are dealing with a percussive instrument. In a militant mood one could argue that in a cello transcription it's the other way around. What we might feel are the essential bits, the cantabile passages, sounds completely natural on a cello and it's the elegant rendering of weightless virtuosity and the launching of instrumental fireworks where the challenge lies. And by the way, what a welcome challenge it is to transfigurate our slightly awkward, oversized vertical violin into an effortlessly managable mini double bass.
I realise I'm pushing it a bit by almost declaring the waltzes better off played on a cello. After all, when I think of unsurpassably superior performances by pianists like Ignaz Friedman or Dinu Lipati, I more feel like forgetting about the cello as a musical instrument all together. But instead of starting to shoot my own soldiers, I'd better call this operation off now!
On to more serious matters: interpretation. What fun and fulfillment there is in interpretng Chopin! In the recording venue we played some preludes and mazurkas through for the first time, sight-reading from the piano score and it was no less than shocking how powerful and original some were. I remember, for example, the shock of the first confrontation with the 2nd prelude (and shortly thereafter the excitement of recording it, trying to preserve that initial emotion). How two minutes of music can become an essay on fate! Like the 7th prelude is one on grace.
All those short pieces have such strong and explicit characters, but perhaps even better, at the same time they seem to elude us. Maybe because they are so real to life in the sense that in the course of playing them, the portrayals and statements keep evolving, changing and developing, nuances being added, as if we are dealing with round characters in a story. A piece like the 4th prelude is never static or one sidedly definable. It's more like a fluidum, making the listener feel as if he is witnessing the creation of thought or the search for a lost memory.
It follows that the biggest challenge in interpreting these short stories, maximen and poems or whatever they are, lies in shaping the subtleties that are at the core of each of them, the details that ultimately carry the message. A challenge as welcome as the above mentioned one, because both are relatively rarely put to us cellists. In our main repertoire, if there is virtuosity asked for it's too often just square figuration and the short compositional form is almost completely missing. Singers and pianists can devote their lives to an abundance of Lieder and short pieces, while we are suffering in deprivation.
Well, not total deprivation. We shouldn't forget about our six preludes and thirty dances from Bach's cello suites. Particularly the skills we've developed in those dance movements. How fortunate we are that we now have 19th century waltzes and polonaises to apply those to. Yet another reason to thank Davidov for putting us on this track.