Clein, Yang

Coach House, Dublin Castle

Coach House, Dublin Castle

When’s the last time you were at a concert of cello and guitar? For most people the answer is probably never. It’s not a combination that many composers have successfully exploited.

Yet an evening of cello and guitar is exactly what’s on offer in the Music Network’s latest tour, which brings together two performers, each well established in her own right – British cellist Natalie Clein and Chinese guitarist Xuefei Yang.

These players were heard together at last year’s KBC Music in Great Irish Houses festival, when the programme was advertised to contain the new solo cello sonata by Thomas Larcher, an Austrian composer who’s been taken up by the ECM label, and whose My Illness is the Medicine I Need, a setting of texts by psychiatric patients, was heard in a heart-rending performance at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival two years ago.

READ MORE

Clein didn’t actually play the new sonata at the Great Irish Houses festival. And, although the piece was down for inclusion again, she didn’t play when the Music Network tour opened at the Coach House of Dublin Castle on Tuesday.

She did, however, offer the Adagio from it, a straightforward, un-tricksy slow movement – Larcher is nothing if not eclectic – that was sombre and luscious and developed into an impassioned songfulness. If it sounded like it was written for Clein, that’s because it was.

Clein opted to segue from the Larcher into The Autumn Song, by Welsh guitarist and composer Stephen Goss, written last year for herself and Yang, a piece composed in a balled style that often brought to mind the world of pop music.

The evening also included two solo works by Bach, the Third Cello Suite, and the first of his solo violin sonatas, arranged for guitar. Both performances were of the kind that put the music in the service of the performer, the cello suite taken as a kind of blank canvas for Clein’s alluringly grainy and rich tone, the violin sonata so successfully transformed into the world of the guitar that something essential in its character was lost. As instrumental delivery, both performances were impressive indeed.

The solo items (which also included a group of guitar pieces by Sainz de la Maza and an arrangement of Wang Hui-Ran’s Yi Dance, originally written for the Chinese pipa) actually proved more interesting than the duos (which included a sonata by Vivaldi, Casals’s Song of the Birds and exaggerated renditions of a number of tangos by Piazzolla).

This was, in short, a curious mish-mash of an evening, one which left me with the feeling I would rather have heard each of the players on her own, rather than in performances as a duo.


Tour continues until April 29th

Michael Dervan

Michael Dervan

Michael Dervan is a music critic and Irish Times contributor