Say and Altstaedt make powerful statement in modern music at Linehan Hall

Sun Feb 02, 2025 at 2:24 pm
Photograph of pianist Fazil Say and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt

Pianist Fazil Say and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt played Britten’s Cello Sonata Saturday night at UMBC’s Linehan Hall. Photo: C. Downey/WCR

Nicolas Altstaedt’s ferocious tone made him stand out in a concerto appearance with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2020. The Heidelberg-born cellist gave two outstanding chamber music performances this week, beginning with a solo program at the Library of Congress Tuesday evening. His duo concert Saturday night, with pianist Fazil Say, got February off to a dynamic start, presented by Chamber Music Maryland in Linehan Hall at UMBC.

Altstaedt’s strengths in his solo recital lay in more modern, dissonant music, with superlative renditions of Henri Dutilleux’s Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher and especially Zoltán Kodály’s folk music-infused Cello Sonata in B Minor. He and Say evinced the same penchant when they played together, opening with an exceptional interpretation of Benjamin Britten’s Cello Sonata, premiered in 1961.

The first of several large works Britten composed for Mstislav Rostropovich, the piece offered up five movements of startling range. Altstaedt delivered all the needed strengths, including robust low notes and animated intensity in the first movement, beefy pizzicati sounding more agitated than delicate in the second, and expressive dreaminess in the elegiac third. Say, not one to shy away from full-bodied sound himself, took the lead from his partner with bravado in the raucous march of the fourth movement, and the Moto perpetuo finale sounded both elegant and mordant.

At the heart of the program was Say’s own composition, the Cello Sonata (“Dört Şehir,” or “Four Cities”) composed for Altstaedt and premiered by him in 2012, which celebrates the vastness of multi-ethnic Turkey. Say performed the piece in 2022 at the Library of Congress, with cellist Jamal Aliyev, a partnership that Say mostly dominated. Altstaedt, who remarked on how playing the piece together over so many years has deepened their understanding of it, more than held his own against Say’s often overpowering pianism.

In the first movement, named for the city of Sivas in eastern Turkey, both musicians deployed a folk-inspired roughness to capture the fervor of the Alevi religious minority there. Altstaedt produced an uncanny imitation of the duduk, an Armenian double-reed instrument, with the closing passage in wispy whistle-tone harmonics on the cello’s lowest string. The second movement’s wild rumpus, inspired by a folk dance in 7/16 time Say heard at a wedding in the Black Sea town of Hopa, percolated with unpredictable energy.

In the third movement, evoking Say’s home town of Ankara, Say used his distinctive technique of stopping the piano’s strings with his right hand to produce a percussive thump of melody, while holding down the sustaining pedal to allow the other strings to resonate sympathetically. Altstaedt, in turn, took up the movement’s themes, adding his own double-stop and percussive sounds. The final movement, an evocation of the night clubs of Bodrum (the Mediterranean port known as Halicarnassus in the ancient world), pulsated with a European distillation of American jazz, sometimes recalling the sound of French composer Michel Legrand.

Samuel Barber’s youthful Cello Sonata, composed while he was still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, revealed the influence of romantic composers like Brahms, but with an already distinctive American edge. In his ardent playing on the A string in the first movement and especially his brawny tone in the surging Adagio, Altstaedt recalled the big-handed strength of a cellist like Rostropovich, a comparison also elicited in the earlier Britten sonata. Both he and Say strove to outpace one another in the driving third movement, filled with intense passion.

After such demonstrations of strength at the forte end of the dynamic spectrum, the interior focus of the final work, Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 1, came as a pleasant surprise. Altstaedt produced a whisper of sound on the first movement’s primary theme, tender and softly burning in its restraint. The development of the themes turned angrier, but both musicians held back in striking ways to create the sense of almost stifled emotion.

The second movement, a graceful dance (“quasi Menuetto,” as Brahms specifies), charmed with elegance, especially the halting, curling motif that opened the trio section. Brahms wrote an Adagio slow movement for this sonata when he was first working on it, but it did not make the final cut when he finished the sonata in 1865. The sonata’s conclusion, a movement marked by a fugal subject derived from Bach’s Art of Fugue (Contrapunctus 13), proceeded explosively, with both musicians vying to bring out their themes in a knot of complexity.

Pianist Boris Giltburg plays music by Rachmaninoff, Schumann, and Liszt 7:30 p.m. March 15 at the Horowitz Center in Columbia. chambermusicmaryland.org


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