Maestro on piano Conductor/pianist Wolfgang Sawallisch and cellist Franz Amann compile and perform Beethoven and Brahms’ cello sonatas on the new album “Cellosonaten”
by David Patrick Stearns
What? The retired Wolfgang Sawallisch is making recordings, but as a pianist?
It's possible. As an opera house repetiteur from an early age, Sawallisch exhibited remarkable muscle memory in 1994 when he stepped in to play Act I of Wagner's Die Walkure on piano when snow kept much of the Philadelphia Orchestra at home.
Cover photos on Cellosonaten, the just-released disc of Beethoven and Brahms cello sonatas on Farao Classics, are the tip-off that these recordings are archival (Sawallilsch is definitely in middle age), as is the playing. The Sawallisch heard in the last years of his 1993-2003 Philadelphia Orchestra tenure was a model of maximum expression drawn from minimum physicality. But in this 1986 reading of Brahms' Cello Sonata No. 2, the imposing opening chords show a leonine Sawallisch holding back nothing.
His partner, Franz Amann (ambiguously identified as "solo cellist" of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, which is essentially the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra), is a strong personality himself, but not one with a Rostropovich-sized sound. That means his charisma threatens to get lost in Sawallisch's unforced but formidable sonority. The sound picture is like a great painting in a too-large frame.
But as one's ears become accustomed to the sonic playing field, both here and in the 1978 readings of Beethoven's Cello Sonatas Nos. 3 (Op. 69) and 5 (Op. 102, No. 2), you realize that these performances justify themselves even amid all the other great recordings of this repertoire -- and not just to listeners with special interest in these performers.
Their distinctive rapport is that which comes from collaborators who know each other on a day-in-day-out basis. Besides exhibiting the usual good chamber music sense, with each player knowing when to pull back for the sake of the other, both (even when standing back) show you things you never heard before, little details that bring a higher sense of logic to what the other musician is doing. There's a freedom here that comes when musicians aren't afraid of stepping on each other's toes.
In fact, the precision of expression that allowed Sawallisch to be a communicative pianist into his 70s allows him on this disc to greatly differentiate the sonorities of Brahms, middle Beethoven (Op. 69), and late Beethoven (Op. 102, No. 2), and not necessarily through pianistic sonority but through his strength of logic. That's something you don't always get from starrier musicians, who often project a certain manner onto all that they play. Here, Amann and particularly Sawallisch play with such arresting clarity that differentiation is inevitable.
That's welcome in Brahms, if only because of the harmonic density of the music, but is particularly crucial in the success of Beethoven's Op. 102 No. 2. Even in the best performances, this music can slip by you, not just because late Beethoven tends to be so inward, but because the melodic ideas are abstruse or baldly obvious. This performance, though, projects complete and convincing certainty. And though I've sometimes described Sawallisch's symphonic recordings as "medium voltage," this chamber music duo couldn't have a higher level of tension without falling into bad taste.
