Akbank Sanat

Alexandra Ivanoff

Young British cellist Natalie Clein made her fourth appearance in Istanbul 29 Eylül, this time at Akbank Sanat, with a program that, in my opinion, was a breath of fresh air. Thank you Natalie: no Brahms, no Mozart, no Beethoven. Based on the frequency of those three composers programmed around town in general, I say: enough of these guys! To my delight (and to the full audience at Akbank as well), Natalie played the music of Zoltan Kodaly, Dvorak, and Chopin, whose only instrumental pieces, aside from his volumes of piano works, were for the cello.

Her program, with British pianist John Lenehan, bore the theme of composers who exhibited the love of their motherland through their music's use of folk material and sounds of nature. The program was Dvorak's "Waldesruhe", Kodaly's formidable Solo Cello Sonata, and Chopin's Cello Sonata and Polonaise, a delightful little dance piece where the cello was used both melodically and as an orchestral bass line with pizzicato (plucked strings). The entrée of the evening's meal was the unaccompanied Cello Sonata by Kodaly, which made use of scordatura, or re-tuning of one or more of the strings. In this case, it was tuning the G string so there was an interval of a minor sixth between it and the D string. This made for a more exotic sound and different chordal possibilities. The piece was full of flights of fancy and fantasy, often brooding then angry, pensive then energetic, and often quite naked. At certain points I longed for piano accompaniment for support when the connective fibers seemed to lose their way. Natalie's execution of this challenging piece and obvious affection for it indicates where I think her heart is: an interpreter of modern music. While others revel in its discordance, she knows how to make Brahms out of it.

Her approach to the sentimental Dvorak employed a featherweight touch and a delicacy throughout—almost too much. The dry acoustics of Akbank don't help an artist project soft and subtle tones, unfortunately. But Dvorak's typical use of folkloric themes in this little meditational ode to the Bohemian forest were a joy to hear. The melancholy Chopin scores were written one year before he died, at the age of 38, and portend to a large extend the future use of the cello as a deeply romantic solo instrument. However, because it's Chopin, "it's really a piano concerto with cello accompaniment," as Natalie announced from the stage. Indeed it was. The piano part, skillfully performed by John Lenehan, used all the familiar virtuoso stylings we're used to hearing in Chopin's multitudinous Scherzos, Waltes, and Etudes. However, the cello's part alternated between moments of aggressive energy and those of long, lyric and melancholic melody, especially in the emotional Largo movement. The couple sitting next to me clasped hands in this lovely romantic mood.

Their encore was Pablo Casals' "Songs of the Birds", a piece that the composer had travelled with all his career, Natalie explained. it was her arrangement, with minimal amounts of piano, and "peeping added by me". A perfect and sweet ending to the theme of what all these composers found in nature, in their homelands.