REVIEW

Michael Dervanreviews Steven Isserlis and Olli Mustonen at the NCH, Dublin

Isserlis, Mustonen
NCH, Dublin

Britten– Cello Sonata.
Olli Mustonen– Cello Sonata.
Sibelius– Malinconia.
Stravinsky– Russian Maiden's Song.
Martinu– Cello Sonata No 1.

Steven Isserlis and Olli Mustonen are an odd couple. Well, perhaps not so odd a couple. Like the conversations of many a seasoned partnership, their playing involves the musical equivalent of talking over each other or at cross purposes, and sometimes just plain old contrariness.

There was an exciting edge to the experience of hearing them together at the National Concert Hall. Isserlis is one of the finest cellists before the public today, while Mustonen is one of the most unpredictably mercurial of pianists, with a technical armoury that ensures he faces few barriers in the execution of even the most fantastical of his ideas. He’s a player who can peck and poke with the highest precision, and he luxuriates in opportunities for the unexpected. If he were an actor, he would probably be running the gamut of implausible pronunciation.

Sibelius’s Malinconia, a Gothic sandwich of a piece, with sorrowful cello passages interspersed with seriously sub-Lisztian rodomontade on the piano, showed the duo at their best, Isserlis wringing feeling from the cello line, Mustonen bustling with sophisticated skill through busy arpeggios on the piano.

But, even in the tune-and-accompaniment style of Stravinsky’s Russian Maiden’s Song (an arrangement of an aria from the opera, Mavra), Mustonen couldn’t resist playing around with the dry wit of Stravinsky’s oompah-style accompaniments.

The result was that, in spite of the skills on display, the centre didn’t quite hold in the Stravinsky, or in the sonatas by Britten and Martinu. There was adrenaline-rich edginess aplenty, but the price of the thrills was a style of music-making that could lapse into incoherence. The wholeness of these pieces never materialised. It was suggested, but always kept teasingly out of reach.

Mustonen’s own Cello Sonata of 2006, and his Frogs Dancing on Water Lilies (which was played as an encore), thrived on divergence, the sonata garrulously linear, the Frogs nicely elliptical in construction. But mostly this was an evening more frustrating than rewarding.