One takes on the Sunday afternoon bus service at one's peril but sometimes needs must and, to be fair, it was fine. I could hardly allow anyone to play Handel and Shostakovich in Havant without me being there.Cellini are Amanda and Stella on cellos and Jonathan on piano doing what the piano, continuo or orchestra would normally do in pieces not all of which were originally written for cellos but we don't let that worry us.
After a little taste of Haydn, the Sonata, opus 2 no.8, was not only not really for cellos but might not have been by Handel, either but, again, such detail is of no concern. The andante and largo sounded like Handel to me, who likes to think he knows the difference, but this is early in the catalogue when Georg was presumably doing his apprenticeship in the Italian style and so if the quicker movements sound like Corelli that would be no surprise. But the largo had already made the trip worthwhile.
Stella usefully explained who Klengel was, introducing the larghetto from Three Pieces for Cello and Piano before Jonathan was required to stand in for the whole chamber orchestra in Vivaldi's one and only Concerto for Two Cellos out of the 500-plus concertos he wrote, and it is one of the 499 in which one can't help but hear phrases from The Four Seasons. One would gladly listen to any amount of interplay between these two players as set out by any number of baroque composers and nobody could accuse Vivaldi of letting an attractive method go under-used.
Ennio Morricone's Gabriel's Oboe was another transcription that proved Noel Coward's dictum 'strange how potent cheap music is' because it was moving in Amanda's exposition
then echoed by Stella's seconmd cello part. One must not regard Morricone as anything less than those Radio 3 composers because, as Cellini showed, he wasn't doing anything much different here.
But the lesser-heard light-hearted Shostakovich provided a fine finale in Five Pieces, which were short and uncluttered by Stalinism, only augmenting the case for him as the greatest of C20th composers by being able to provide these gorgeous, almost Palm Court, miniatures in the same body of work as the Leningrad Symphony and the often bleak string quartets.
Cellini were tremendous, playing this music for the love of it, for donations to the church fund. I'm glad I took the trouble to look up what was on in the area only yesterday.
