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A Color & Soul Explosion On Sprague’s Stage

by Paul Bass | Apr 18, 2006 11:35 am

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Posted to: Arts

In one of New Haven’s cherished spring rituals, a sold-out crowd came to see 18 cellos and their owners (three of whom, in the top photo, waited in the wings during intermission) share the stage with a riot of bright colors on canvas at Sprague Hall Monday night.

The rite is the annual “Yale Cellos” concert. It brings together two spectacles: A battery of musicians playing the cello, and just the cello, that most soulful of string instruments, emerging from its usual background ensemble role to soar and strut and tremble. And the fanciful, roaming paintings of a local artist.

Those two spectacles go together because one man is responsible for both of them: octagenarian Aldo Parisot (pictured). One of the world’s leading masters of the instrument, Parisot leads Yale School of Music’s cello program. He also paints the pictures that adorn the Sprague stage during the annual spring performance that he directs.

The evening offers an opportunity to show what the cello can do. As the full group of cellists demonstrated in the pieces they played together in the program’s second half, the instrument can capture the full range of more traditional string ensembles, creeping down to the bass-ment and back up to the lyrical pitches of the viola and violin, sometimes grounding pieces in rhythm, other times leading in melody. It can fill out popular Spanish lullabies and dances, as in Monday night’s performance of Manuel de Falla’s Suite Popularie Espagnole; build on the spiritual melodic themes of the excerpts played of Dave Brubeck’s Mass, to Hope!; imitate the leading violins of an orchestral piece like Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins.

These full-group pieces are the main attraction, the standby, of these annual concerts. Just the sight and sound of 18 cellos offer an unusual and rewarding enough performance to merit the price of admission.

As predictably enjoyable and impressive as those pieces were, the highlights for me Monday night came earlier, in the program’s opening four pieces. In three of these, a single cellist performed, backed on piano. The fourth consisted of a quintet, two cellos backs by violins and viola.

In reversing the cello’s role, fronting rather than supplementing the other instruments, the pieces revealed the cello’s remarkable range even more dramatically than the later pieces did. Sitting center stage, each of the soloists—Anna Cho, Estelle Choi, Dmitri Atapine—hugged and gripped and pleaded and at times attacked with their instruments as though they were wrestling bear.

Choi most of all seemed to wrestle her quarry in her rendition of Alberto Ginastera’s Pampeana No. 2. I felt exhausted just watching her extract the piece’s different melodies and rhythms with such physical and emotional intensity. With its modernist flights from predictable rhythms or melodic resolutions, the piece leapt from the more traditional Romantic confines of the one that preceded it, Rachmaninoff’s Andante. The program notes explained that “Pampeanas” refer to Argentine plains where the “gaucho (Argentine cowboy) made his home.” Choi transported us to those plains in that gaucho’s rough-riding care.

Following Choi, Atapine evoked a bullfighter’s dramatic flourishes with Gaspar Cassado’s Requiebros. Then, in front of the quintet performing David Popper’s Elfentanz, Atapine employed a Borscht Belt comic’s physical timing in gingerly racing up and down the neck sounding high-pitched steps of elfin prancing. On a cello—who’d have thought?

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