Rejoice
Pēteris Vasks (b.1946)
Plainscapes (2002)
Maxim Shalygin (b. 1985)
Angel (2020)
Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025)
Rejoice! Sonata for Violin and Violoncello (1981)
Merel Vercammen (violin), Maya Fridman (cello)
Capella Amsterdam/Daniel Reuss
rec. 2024/2025, Pieterskerk, Utrecht, The Netherlands
All Ears Records AER002 [54]

Merel Vercammen and Maya Fridman have been performing together since 2018. This, their first full-length duo recording, presents three contrasting works for violin and cello, one of which also features a choir.

Maxim Shalygin is a Ukrainian composer who lives in the Netherlands. His Wikipedia page describes his style as ‘expanding traditional playing techniques, maintaining a tonal language, and avoiding avant-garde radicalism’. Angel was first composed for piano solo and exists in several arrangements, one of which was made especially for these performers. They describe a previous performance, on video, for which, alarmingly, they were placed on high stools and ‘harnessed to the ceiling’. With no video element, what we hear is a seven-minute piece that is, for the most part, melody and accompaniment, where the melody is a sad refrain with a repetitive rhythm and the accompaniment is held chords. The violin and cello roles alternate. It is a melancholy, rather hypnotic piece that rises to a passionate climax where the violin is supported by sonorous cello drones. The work put me in mind of the music of Giya Kancheli. The artists write: ‘Angel gives voice to the relationship between humanity and nature in an artistically expressive way.’

If a composer chooses to name a piece Rejoice! – note the exclamation mark – most listeners would, I think, expect something joyful. In my relatively limited experience not much of Sofia Gubaidulina’s music could be described as joyful, and the present work is no exception. A minimum of online research was needed – the booklet was of no help – to find the explanation in an old Gramophone review. ‘It should not be assumed that I wanted to illustrate the theme of joy in my music … the religious theme is experienced metaphorically.’ Harmonics, the technique where the player touches the string lightly with the fingers of the left hand rather than pressing down hard, producing notes higher in pitch and with a different, rather ethereal tone, are an important component of this work. The composer tells us that this phenomenon ‘can be experienced in music as the transition to another plane of experience. And that is joy.’ Harmonics are employed in Rejoice! as early as the second note and frequently throughout. The work is in five movements, each one taking its title from the writings of ‘the Ukrainian religious philosopher, Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722-1794)’. The first movement consists of a solo passage for the violin in its upper register, music of few notes and immense calm, which is then disturbed by the arrival of the cello, in its lower register at first, but also rising into the stratosphere, providing some kind of reconciliation with the violin. Are there clues here to the movement’s title, ‘Your joy no one taketh from you’? The second movement, ‘Rejoice with them that do rejoice’ is made up of rapid scale passages, low-intensity music that does not rise to any climax. The third movement is the longest, entitled ‘Rejoice, rabbi’, and is more varied, with a climax involving much violent double stopping. The ending is calm but with some tortured turning around a single note. The fourth movement, curiously entitled ‘And he returned into his house’ features much high-register writing and semitone dissonances that do not make for easy listening. The final movement, ‘Listen to the still small voice within’ is, for the most part, a rapid, high-lying passage for the violin – with, unusually, a sense of pulse – over a slow-moving melody from the cello. The two instruments come together at the close, where the music dissolves into silence in an atmosphere that this listener experiences as the total absence of hope. I have spent a lot of time with this work – helped by an internet site that allows you to follow the score as you listen – trying to understand what the composer was aiming at. I can hear nothing in the music that links to its title, nor to each movement’s subtitle. There are many highly impressive moments, but too many where extreme dissonance and advanced playing techniques do not, to my mind, lead to any real message. I also feel that the musical material is too thin to carry a work that lasts for a good half hour.

Plainscapes, by Peteris Vasks, opens the programme. The work is in three parts, played without a break. The first part is very calm, the second brings a little more energy, whilst the third rises to a quite commanding climax. Those who have encountered Vasks’ shorter choral works – his Dona Nobis Pacem, for instance, or his Pater Noster – will recognise immediately the slow-moving, diatonic harmonies which, when seen on the page, would lead one to fear monotony. In fact the harmonic progressions are carefully and skilfully contrived, rarely straying into chromatic territory, and so simple that one wonders quite how they achieve such a striking effect. The music is profoundly contemplative, the choral writing wordless, which the string duo accompany – in the pure sense of the word – with varied figuration, slides, gentle squeaks and twitters. We wait for the choir to imitate birds as the insert note promises us, but this only happens three-quarters of the way through, and then in a most surprising and moving way; the choir is required to whistle. There are indeed some virtuoso whistlers among the sixteen members of Capella Amsterdam named in the booklet, because they conjure up with remarkable skill a distant, near-silent nocturnal aviary. Plainscapes is a powerful testimony of the composer’s profound concern for the natural world and mankind’s place in it. Some listeners might find the restraint and economy of this music tedious. I find it both beautiful and moving.

The choir sings and chirrups beautifully, and Merel Vercammen and Maya Fridman are no less skilful at taking us into Vasks’ rarefied world. They play the whole programme with great virtuosity and the utmost conviction. That conviction is also evident in their booklet notes, though solid information is in short supply, and I am not totally convinced by the claim that ‘What links these three composers … is their profound kinship with nature’, at least as far as it can be applied to this particular programme. The recording team, Brendon Heist, Hans Erblich and Tycho Verhagen have done a superb job and the booklet boasts some handsome photographs of the artists. This is a fine disc for anyone attracted by the repertoire.

William Hedley