GRAMOPHONE Review: Shostakovich Cello Concertos 1 & 2 – Alexander Kniazev, Yokohama Sinfonietta/Yamada

Shostakovich’s two cello concertos plainly share the same musical DNA – but it’s almost as if the Second (which I am delighted to see becoming more and more core repertoire and a work of choice among leading cellists) has grown out of the First elaborating on the former’s concision but sharing that acute sense of inwardness for which the composer was justly celebrated. While the First gives us a glimpse of that solitude and desolation in the the slow movement and cadenza the Second takes the internal monologue to another level.

Alexander Knaizev (clearly a force of nature) could hardly be more up close and personal, the recording balance spotlighting him with an immediacy which catches even his emotive grunts. It’s a balance you never experience in a concert hall and I like how it pulls focus on the starkness of the writing for both soloist and orchestra throwing their interaction into sharp relief. The conductor Kabuki Yamada (the CBSO’s Music Director) drives his Yokohama Sinfonietta with urgency and precision – he and Knaizev are very much kindred spirits in this – maximising the minimalism of the First Concerto’s gripping use of repetition. I’d like to have heard more ripeness and audacity from the obbligato horn but the wind writing generally has the requisite pungency.

Knaizev finds great intensity in the upper register and an exciting gruffness below but it is his his way with desolation (the icy chill of his harmonics against celeste in the slow movement) and the transition from contemplation to fierce defiance in the big cadenza that really hits home.

The Second Concerto’s opening Largo – the bleakest of internal monologues, an aria of despair that only one composer could have penned – finds Knaizev at his most searching. What an extraordinary movement. The grotesque punctuation of those bass drum thwacks (so redolent of the unfinished Mahler 10 finale) feel every bit as incongruous as the rattle of tambourine in the later cadenza – and yet there is a rightness about them that one cannot explain. Likewise those wild dances (where jubilance and desperation feel indivisible) that seem to arrive from nowhere. Knaizev finds real sweetness of longing in the little ritornello which keeps reoccurring in the finale like a glimmer of hope. And there is, of course, the last word (or last laugh) in the ticking percussion from his renegade Fourth Symphony which puts the piece to an uneasy rest.

This is excellent – and always good to hear the two pieces in tandem.