Knockout premiere for cello, piano duo
“So who is Pascal Dusapin?” asked a friend during the intermission of Sunday’s duo recital by cellist Anssi Karttunen and pianist Nicolas Hodges, as we tried to assimilate the depth and extent of the musical masterpiece we’d just taken in.
I did my best to answer her query — French composer, in his mid-60s, modernist of a certain not entirely mainstream bent — but I was struggling, and the consequent urge to self-reproach was strong. Suddenly, all the hours I’d devoted to anything except acquiring a thorough acquaintance with Dusapin’s oeuvre struck me as grievously ill-spent.
The inspiration for all of this was a four-movement piece titled “Slackline,” which received its U.S. premiere in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall as part of a program presented by Cal Performances (the work’s commissioner). To listen to this music, in Karttunen and Hodges’ eloquent, sure-handed rendition, was to feel a constant combination of surprise and confidence — every moment of the piece seemed new and unexpected, and yet it all made glorious sense.
Also, the music is surpassingly beautiful, which has not
always been the case in my encounters with Dusapin’s work. But “Slackline” boasts a vivid, almost ingratiating air of immediacy, an urgent desire to engage the listener without compromise or sentimentality.
Each of the duo’s movements is briskly, unmistakably characterized in both mood and technique. The opening movement, marked “Peaceful,” grows out of a simple, easily grasped melody that serves as the substance for a long and ingenious musical essay. The discussion is by turns urgent and reflective, but always keeps the main theme — and, most tellingly, its harmonic underpinnings — somewhere in sight.
Dusapin follows this with an exuberant crowd-pleaser, a ferociously fast, unbroken stream of barrelhouse piano into which the cello makes dogged interjections without much hope of stanching the flood. The music proved so sleek and wonderful that not even a short hiatus while a patron found and silenced a ringing cell phone could diminish its luster.
But wait, there’s more! The whirlwind is followed by an eerie boneyard of long-held string harmonics and spare, translucent harmonies, and then a celebratory finale launched by a series of chiming piano chords reminiscent of Messiaen. By the time “Slackline” had run its nearly 25-minute course, audience members felt we had been through a landmark experience — and wanted nothing more than to hear the piece again.
Even if nothing else on the program matched that exhilarating high, the partnership of Karttunen and Hodges turned out to be equally alluring in both new and old music. They led off with the U.S. premiere of “Fling,” a short curtain-raiser by the Iranian-born composer Ashkan Behzadi that turned out to be an entirely sculptural collection of musical gestures — tone clusters, string effects, tiny bursts of sound — arranged in compellingly abstract combinations.
The program also had promised a commissioned world premiere by Sean Shepherd, but that was replaced at the last minute by Fred Lerdahl’s Duo for Cello and Piano. In its U.S. premiere, this emerged as a 15-minute dialogue of restrained good manners, in which musical ideas were traded back and forth with genteel consideration but not much force.
The older composers were, unsurprisingly, Beethoven and Brahms, each represented by his final Sonata for Cello and Piano. Karttunen and Hodges gave both works performances of impeccable, if slightly austere, mastery, most appealingly in the slow movement of Beethoven’s D-Major Sonata, Op. 102, No. 2.