Barber: Cello Concerto and Sonata – Poltéra

There is something almost unbearably poignant about hearing a twenty-two-year-old write music of such settled emotional confidence. Barber composed his Cello Sonata, op. 6, while still a student at Curtis, and the piece carries none of the tentativeness we associate with student work. It strides in. That opening gesture in the cello, rising and falling with an almost vocal urgency, tells you immediately that this young American had already found his voice — and that the voice was unfashionably, defiantly lyrical at a moment when lyricism was going out of style in Philadelphia and everywhere else.

Christian Poltéra plays it as though he has lived inside the piece for years. This disc continues a pattern established on his earlier BIS recordings of Schoeck, Honegger, and Martin: pairing concerto with sonata by the same composer, an approach that rewards the listener with a kind of interpretive triangulation you rarely get on single-work discs. His 1675 Guarnerius produces a tone that’s dark at the core but never murky, with an upper register that opens out like a soprano finding her top notes without strain. In the first movement’s big romantic paragraphs he never forces the sound. The intensity comes from bow speed and vibrato, not from leaning on the string.

Kathryn Stott is the ideal partner here, has been for years, in this repertoire and much else. Barber gives the pianist a formidable amount to do. In the finale, which opens with writing that could have been misplaced from Brahms’s F major Cello Sonata, she attacks the keyboard with real weight without ever swamping her partner. The second movement’s presto central section goes by in a blur of precise, almost antic energy, framed by adagio material that Poltéra sings — and “sings” really is the word, not just the metaphor — with a plangency that deepens on its return. Too many performances play the reprise as mere repetition. Here it aches a little more.

The Concerto, op. 22, is a trickier proposition, and history hasn’t been especially kind to it. Written in 1945 for Raya Garbousova, it has never entered the repertoire the way the Violin Concerto has, partly because the solo writing sits so awkwardly, full of high-lying passages that can sound effortful rather than expressive in lesser hands. Poltéra and Andrew Litton, leading the Bergen Philharmonic with obvious sympathy for the idiom, don’t entirely solve the concerto’s structural problems — the first movement still feels a touch discursive — but they make the strongest possible case for it as sound, if not always as architecture. The slow movement, an andante sostenuto that occasionally recalls the world of the Adagio for Strings without quite being it, is the emotional center. Litton paces it with unhurried tenderness, letting Bergen’s woodwinds breathe.

Which brings us to the Adagio for Strings: inevitable filler, and by now one of the most overexposed pieces in the American repertoire, trailing behind it a half-century of funerals, 9/11 broadcasts, and Platoon. As Malcolm MacDonald notes in his booklet essay, Barber conceived the music — originally the slow movement of his String Quartet, op. 11 — with Virgil’s Georgics in mind, an image of a stream swelling into a river, not a lament for anybody in particular. Elgar never intended “Nimrod” as a national elegy either, and audiences have overruled both composers with equal stubbornness.

Litton leans into the elegiac reading anyway, and honestly, why not. It’s a gorgeous reading. The Bergen strings blend with a warmth that never curdles into syrup, and the great climax arrives with cumulative inevitability rather than blunt force. I went back afterward to Marin Alsop’s version with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and, further back still, to Bernstein’s granitic, almost unbearably slow account with the New York Philharmonic. Litton sits between those extremes, and Bergen’s string section, engineered with real depth and air around each entry, sounds gorgeous doing it.

Taken as a whole, this is a Barber disc of real distinction. Poltéra’s sonata alone would justify the purchase, urgent and idiomatic in every bar, and the concerto gets as persuasive an advocacy as it’s had on disc in years. Not a first choice for the Adagio alone, if that’s all you want. For everything else here, very nearly a best choice.