REVIEW: CMS Leaders Share What Chamber Music is About

Feb 12

Feb 12 REVIEW: CMS Leaders Share What Chamber Music is About

Above, David Finckel and Wu Han. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

January 31, 2024

Artistic directors of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, manifest what chamber music is all about. Partners in life, as well as in music-making and artistic directing, their recent concert at Alice Tully Hall was a heart-nourishing, wisdom-gleaning evening spent in the home of one those great enduring couples we encounter in life, who share their wisdom by inviting us in, demonstrating and doing.

Their connection and mutuality was apparent as they revisited the first work commissioned for them as a duo, Bruce Adolphe’s Couple for Cello and Piano, buttressed insightfully by two emotionally challenging sonatas by Debussy and Shostakovich. Later, they were joined by Richard Lin and Timothy Ridout on violin and viola, respectively, for a celebratory, life-affirming reading of Dvořák’s Piano Quartet in E-flat, Op. 87.

*David Finckel and Wu Han. Photo by Da Ping Luo.*

Claude Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano is one of his later compositions — composed in 1915 after the start of World War I — and one of his more puzzling at first listen. Far from the florid texture of “impressionism,” the composer described this as “pure” music. Yet, it is theatrical and discursive, and vivid evidence of the cracks in tradition happening in Europe at this time in Debussy’s life.

Finckel and Wu Han presented the non-sequitur opening phrases of the Prologue first movement with directness and simplicity, and as the angular, oddly-hued music blossoms and recedes, their immediacy made it sing. The second movement, Sérénade, is angular and hesitant. The two instruments clumsily blurt, then glide, taking turns at first, then stepping on each others’ toes, and occasionally, joining in harmony. The duo seemed to re-enact the awkward early moments of a relationship, and in the sudden relief of the Animé finale, the feeling of things beginning to flow, Debussy finally rewarding us with tonality and motion.

Bruce Adolphe’s Couple, composed in 1998 for the duo, unfolds in four exquisite movements, lyrical and sustaining. Wu Han and Finckel carefully allow the phrases and sonorities to unfold with a sense of poetry and sensuality. Darkness is inevitable, too, and the Sonata in D Minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 40, of Dmitri Shostakovich brought us back to reality, and to more tumultuous territories.

Wu Han’s virtuosity was on full display in Shostakovich’s diving, athletic figurations. The pair steered us through the sonata with a translator’s mastery of language, placing the Sonata’s emotionally ambiguous message into digestible, well-punctuated phrases, and with a dramatist’s sense of pacing and denouement.

*Richard Lin, Timothy Ridout, David Finckel and Wu Han. Photo by Da Ping Luo.*

The second half of the program was pure joy, with Lin and Ridout joining the party. Antonín Dvořák’s Quartet in E-flat provided a delicious assortment of the great Czech composer’s most flavorful recipes. Finckel and Wu Han encouraged their guests to take the lead, supporting and cajoling, but listening and learning, as well, and the sweeping exuberance of the work’s finale sparkled with the unique confluence of energy that can only be experienced through chamber music.