Christoph Wagner, cello
Joanne Kong, piano
Oct. 25, Modlin Arts Center, University of Richmond
The performing partnership of Christoph Wagner, a German cellist now teaching at the University of New Mexico, and Joanne Kong, the University of Richmond-based pianist and harpsichordist, has been ongoing for several years. The duo’s latest performance, before a well-filled Camp Concert Hall in UR’s Modlin Arts Center, showed both their crafting of complementary voices and their exploration of interesting byways in the cello-and-piano repertory.
The only repertory standard they played, Brahms’ Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 99, capped a program otherwise devoted to lesser-known works by Frédéric Chopin, Bohuslav Martinů and Giovanni Sollima, at least one of which, Martinů’s “Variations on a Slovak Theme,” rates as a miniature masterpiece.
The Martinů variations, completed shortly before the composer’s death in 1959, both recall his musical roots in Czechoslovakia and touch on the stylistic trends he absorbed in mid-20th century Paris, New York and elsewhere in a peripatetic life and career. The piece has been described as a summation of his musical odyssey, although it touches only lightly on the percolating, harmonically hazy qualities heard in his orchestral scores.
The Martinů shared the first half of the duo’s program with Chopin’s “Introduction and Polonaise brillante,” Op. 3, the work of a 20-year-old that echoes the florid showpieces of musicians such as violinist Niccolò Paganini and pianist Ignaz Moscheles, and one of the themes from Sollima’s score for the film “Il bell’ Antonio.”
Wagner and Kong gave a nervy account of the Chopin, emphasizing the piece’s brillante qualities if at times smearing its more note-heavy figurations. Their treatment of the Martinů focused more on its soulful melody, which comes from the same musical gene pool that produced Dvořák’s Slavonic dances and Brahms’ Hungarian dances, than on the composer’s more urbane modernist-neoclassical idiom. The duo’s interpretation of the Sollima centered on its darkish tonal palette, circular, torque-like energy and contrast of minimalist and romantic styles.
The Brahms sonata, composed around the same as his Fourth Symphony and Double Concerto for violin and cello (the cellist Robert Hausmann played in the premieres of both the sonata and the concerto) and reflecting the lean, classically rooted romanticism of Brahms’ late works, received a straightforward reading from the duo, notable for Kong’s reining in of the piano part to achieve sonic parity with the cello and for Wagner’s robust voicing and especially resonant pizzicatos.