Cello Sonatas – Truls Mørk and Håvard Gimse

There is a particular sound a cello makes in a stone church — the resonance blooms and hangs, refusing to die quickly the way it might in a dry studio — and Truls Mørk exploits that acoustic at Sofienberg like a man who has thought about nothing else for weeks. The engineers have placed the microphones close, perhaps too close; there were moments, in the Bridge sonata especially, when I wanted to reach into the speakers and pull them back a few feet. But the tone that comes through, once you’ve turned the volume down to something sane, is extraordinary: dark, grained, full of a kind of Nordic gravity that suits this repertoire rather well.

Frank Bridge’s Cello Sonata in D minor is the least-known work here and arguably the finest discovery on the disc. Begun in 1913, before the war, and finished in 1917 in the thick of it, the piece charts a composer’s disillusionment in real time — you can practically hear Bridge’s harmonic language curdling, moving from the ripe late-Romanticism of Frank Bridge the Edwardian favorite toward the more astringent, war-scarred idiom that would eventually estrange him from English concert audiences and push him toward his most famous pupil, Benjamin Britten. Mørk opens the first movement with a long-breathed, elegiac line, dark as oiled wood, and Gimse’s piano writing underneath him has real weight without ever turning to mud. The second movement is harder going — deliberately so. Its chromaticism churns rather than sings, and the scherzo-like episode buried inside it feels less like relief than like gallows humor. Mørk and Gimse don’t try to prettify it. Good.

Debussy’s sonata gets a reading of unusual weight and seriousness, maybe too much of both. This is late Debussy, composed in 1915 while he was dying of cancer and France was tearing itself apart, and he originally wanted to call it Pierrot fâché avec la lune — “Pierrot angry at the moon” — before settling for the abstraction of Prologue, Sérénade, Final. There ought to be some acid in this music, some of the commedia dell’arte snap that Rostropovich and Britten found in their classic 1961 Aldeburgh release, all sardonic pizzicato and mercurial wit. Mørk plays it beautifully but a shade too reverently; the “Sérénade,” with its ghostly col legno effects and mock-guitar strumming, wants more mischief, more of the sound of a street performer sending up his own heartbreak. Still, the tone is gorgeous, and the Final‘s manic energy comes off with real bite.

Janáček’s Pohádka — never called a sonata by its composer, though it plainly is one in all but name — takes its title from Zhukovsky’s fairy-tale poem about Tsarevich Ivan and the water-king’s daughter, and the music has that folkloric, speech-rhythm quality that runs through everything Janáček wrote after his late-life infatuation with Kamila Stösslová shook him back into creative life. This performance is warmly idiomatic without quite matching the unhinged, feverish quality that the finest Czech and Russian duos bring to it — I keep coming back to older Rostropovich accounts, and to Steven Isserlis’s version with Olli Mustonen, for that particular blend of tenderness and instability. Mørk’s reading is handsome, well-shaped, a little too comfortable in its own skin.

Britten’s Cello Sonata in C major, op. 65, closes the program, and here the shadow of Rostropovich is unavoidable — he was, after all, the dedicatee, and the piece grew directly out of the friendship struck up at the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival, where Britten heard him play the Shostakovich concerto and was reportedly bowled over. The Britten-Rostropovich Decca recording from 1961 remains, for me, close to definitive: astringent, spiky, full of barely suppressed nervous energy in the “Scherzo-pizzicato” and a bleak grandeur in the closing “Moto perpetuo.” Mørk doesn’t unseat that memory — nobody quite has — but he and Gimse give a performance of real intelligence and command, finding the tolling bell sonorities of the first movement’s opening gesture with unusual gravity, and dispatching the pizzicato scherzo with crackling articulation, every plucked note popping cleanly even through that resonant acoustic.

Taken as a whole, this is a satisfying, generously played disc rather than a revelatory one. Mørk’s tone is a constant pleasure — burnished, ample, never thin — and Gimse proves an alert, sympathetic partner throughout, particularly attentive to Bridge’s harmonic ambiguities and Britten’s astringencies. But in three of these four works, ghosts loom larger than the present reading, and I suspect most listeners who already own a Rostropovich disc, or Isserlis’s Janáček, will want this one as a supplement rather than a replacement. The Bridge, though — the Bridge alone justifies acquiring it.