Cello-Piano Duos Prove Popular This Winter
Formed in 1980, the Timothy Eddy/Gilbert Kalish cello-piano duo is another remarkable collaboration. The two players are ubiquitous on the music scene: in addition to giving concerts together, they are active as soloists, chamber musicians and pedagogues. Eddy is the cellist of the Orion Quartet, in residence at Mannes, in whose intimate concert hall the Duo often presents sonata recitals. Their latest concert there—a capacity house on January 25th, 2010—featured many different styles. Classicism: Beethoven’s Variations on a Theme from Mozart’s Magic Flute, played with grace, humor, and inward expressiveness; Romanticism blended with atonality: Ben Weber’s brief Five Pieces, in which three sustained, slow, mournful character sketches are framed by two lively ones; Impressionism: Debussy’s colorful, piquant, ironic Sonata, and Fauré’s Sonata No. 2, elusive and very rarely performed, but obviously loved by these two players. After all this misty evanescence, the vigorous, earthly Prokofiev Sonata brought a sense of relief, as if the clouds had lifted and revealed solid ground under a blue sky. The players, too, seemed more relaxed, unrestrained and free, reveling in its rhythmic vitality and its full-blooded, soaring melodies, totally at one with the music and each other.
