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Washington Post, 5. Oktober 2009

Strong Cellist, Pianist Animate Beethoven
by Cecelia Porter

Beethoven broke new paths with his music. In many of his compositions he fragmented his themes, making them almost unrecognizable, leaving it up to performers to make sense of the whole. Friedrich Kleinhapl, on a lovely 1743 Guadagnini cello, and the pianist Andreas Woyke played Beethoven’s first three sonatas for their instruments at the Austrian Embassy on Thursday night. Creating scenes of exciting havoc, their performance was driven and unorthodox, leading the capacity audience to the brink of the music’s emotional abyss by quicker-than-the speed-of-light contrasts in dynamics and tempo, abrupt pauses, and asymmetrical phrasing. Yet, working together as if one voice, the duo gave daring new meaning to Beethoven’s overall structural landscape even in these early works. (Occasionally, to some ears, however, the musicians’ extremes bypassed the cello’s opportunities for full-bodied resonance.)
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Kleinhapl wedged two relatively recent pieces for unaccompanied cello between the Beethovens: the Norwegian composer Oistein Sommerfeldt’s “Monologi,” Op. 45, and the cadenza from the Cello Concerto by the Austrian pianist/composer Friedrich Gulda. Kleinhapl said he believed that the “Monologi” expressed the composer’s “feeling of abandonment.” And indeed, in Kleinhapl’s hands, the opening movement raced by in a capricious flurry, sometimes thrashing about, sometimes yielding to searing lyricism, and always absorbing. In Gulda’s hypnotizing essay, Kleinhapl dashed through a striking array of many-hued tremolos, some flirting dangerously near the cello’s bridge and reinforced by eerie harmonics. A compelling tango by Astor Piazzolla capped the evening.

The Vocal Arts Society co-sponsored the concert.

--Cecelia Porter