Matt Haimovitz’s latest recital of twentieth-century cello compositions sustains the thesis of its predecessors (12/95 and 5/97) that extreme contrast, not merely variety, has been the spice of twentieth-century musical life. To juxtapose two works from 1914, Reger’s Third Suite and Webern’s Three Little Pieces, the former expansive and retrospective, the latter aphoristic and reaching nervously into an unknowable future, makes the point with admirable immediacy.
The rest of the music here is more mainstream, the Britten Sonata showing that there was as much mileage left in the old classical genres in 1960 as Debussy had found in his Sonata more than 40 years before. With these works, of course, Haimowitz is competing against a long series of distinguished predecessors on disc, and his partnership with Cassard (how often have they played these works in concert, I wonder?) can’t match the empathy of Moray Welsh and John Lenehan in the Britten, or – it goes without saying – of Rostropovich and Britten himself in both sonatas.
The recording as such is at its best in the unaccompanied works, its closeness and resonance reinforcing the powerful musical profile of Dutilleux’s elegant yet forceful Strophes, and helping to ensure that Reger does not seriously outstay his welcome. In Webern, Debussy and Britten the piano sound has an abrasive aspect to it, as if the object were to underline the incompatibility of two such different instruments. But the playing is technically first-rate, and should certainly open doors (why the French title?) to anyone exploring this repertory for the first time.'