Sonata in C....Britten
Sonata in E minor....Brahms
Kiss on Wood....James MacMillan
Sonata in A minor....Grieg
Julian Lloyd Webber's cello recital last Saturday night in the National Concert Hall's celebrity series provoked a mixture of admiration and frustration. His subtle gradations of colour and volume, unfailingly beautiful sound and impeccable tuning were extraordinary. His partnership with pianist John Lenehan, who seemed unflappable in the face of technical challenges which sometimes surpassed those of the cello, was so close they seemed of one mind. His attractive stage manner and his capacity to draw his audience into the world he was creating were hallmarks of a star per former.
Yet his playing was so personalised that it subsumed the differing compositional and expressive styles of each piece. It seemed the performer was not the vehicle for the music, but the main focus of the recital.
The most serious casualty was Brahms's Sonata in E minor. Julian Lloyd Webber forced the tempos by dashing at phrases; and even the metre was sometimes distorted by a preoccupation with immediate effect. These qualities fragmented the architechtonic thinking of the outer movements, and missed the first's Romantic lyricism. The most successful movement was the middle one, whose dance-based rhythms allow comparatively little room for such intervention.
Grieg's Sonata in A minor had similar problems, but Britten's concentrated, virtuosic Sonata in C less so. I wondered if it might be significant that a convincing match between the styles of performance and composition occurred in those works with some sort of personal connection. James MacMillan's Kiss on Wood was arranged by the composer for these performers, from the original for violin and piano. One of the four encores was written by Julian Lloyd Webber (Jackie's Song), and two others were written for him by his brother Andrew (Variations) and by his late father William (Nocturne).