Cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Denes Várjon are known as instrumentalists for connoisseurs, delving deep into the structures of work and programming them in intelligent ways. You wouldn't pick Isserlis as a Chopin specialist, and Chopin wrote very little chamber music anyway. But he and Várjon deliver a gripping performance of the Chopin Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 65, a notoriously troublesome work whose text is far from fixed. They play the first movement Maestoso, as it is marked in some sources, and they present a ...
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Cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Denes Várjon are known as instrumentalists for connoisseurs, delving deep into the structures of work and programming them in intelligent ways. You wouldn't pick Isserlis as a Chopin specialist, and Chopin wrote very little chamber music anyway. But he and Várjon deliver a gripping performance of the Chopin Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 65, a notoriously troublesome work whose text is far from fixed. They play the first movement Maestoso, as it is marked in some sources, and they present a vision of the sonata as a work of great seriousness, complexity, and ambition. The lessons taught by Beethoven had still hardly been absorbed by the mid-1840s, and for Isserlis and Várjon, Chopin was trying to wrestle with Beethoven's mixture of heroic style and motivic complexity. It's not the only way to approach the sonata, but the work is quite powerful as rendered here; sample and consider the first movement. The other major work on the program, Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata in...
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