Catherine Wilmers (cello) and Helen Shabetai (piano) delighted their capacity audience on Saturday afternoon June 7th with music covering three centuries.
They immediately engaged the audience with Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 6 in Bb, highlighting the contrast between its cantabile Largo movement and the spirited final Allegro.
The Beethoven Seven Variations on a theme from The Magic Flute were strangely spare and sometimes bleak, but rounded off with a witty ending.
There followed three items by women composers: a larger proportion than is achieved in most concerts, even now that music by women is much more to the fore.
Catherine described her detective work in searching out the Three Pieces by Peggy Spencer-Palmer (1900-87). It was both charming and salutary to hear how equal the partnership was between piano and cello, in quite a different way from the Beethoven.
Lalai – a set of pieces by Barbara Heller (b. 1936) was dedicated to fifty Iranian women who had been imprisoned and murdered, and was at times quite heart-rending. It included a cello solo movement built over a percussive drone on a single low piano note achieved by virtue of Helen’s reaching into the piano and raising the relevant damper. This could have been misconstrued as a dramatic effect, but was carried out with discretion appropriate to the message in the music.
The final item was Three Pieces (1915) by Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), which were by turns contemplative, humorous, plaintive and dramatic.
The warm and extended applause persuaded the duo to give an encore: a gentle Lullaby by Alice Verne Bredt (1864-1958). This was an item from Catherine’s latest CD, of music by British women composers, which was released only one day before this recital.
Clifton Hughes