Fifteen years old. Let that sink in for a moment before you press play.
Maciej Kułakowski, a cellist from Gdańsk, recorded this program while still navigating the particular indignities of adolescence — and what he chose to play, or what was chosen for him, is not exactly a recital of easy crowd-pleasers. The Prokofiev Cello Sonata in C major, op. 119, is one of the most demanding and emotionally opaque works in the entire cello-and-piano literature, a piece Rostropovich and Richter famously recorded with a kind of gaunt ferocity that left audiences unsettled. This is not repertoire for the faint-hearted or the insufficiently formed. That Kułakowski attempts it at all is remarkable. That he partially succeeds is, frankly, astonishing.
His partner Dominika Glapiak, also Gdańsk-born and trained at the same conservatory, is the more experienced artist here — you can hear it — and the question of whose name belongs above whose in the credits strikes me as beside the point. The music tells you everything.
Start with the Popper Hungarian Rhapsody, op. 68. David Popper — cellist to the Austro-Hungarian court, sometime professor at the Budapest Academy, composer of some of the most irresistibly showy salon pieces the instrument possesses — wrote this in 1894, when he was already past fifty and had nothing left to prove. The idiom is Liszt filtered through gut strings and horsehair, all Magyar fire and decorative excess. Kułakowski dispatches the piece with real confidence, and his tone in the upper register has a natural warmth that some cellists twice his age spend decades chasing. The portamentos, though — some of them are simply too heavy, slowing the emotional momentum at exactly the moments when the music wants to lift off. Rhythmic precision occasionally wobbles. But you hear a young musician who has been genuinely inhabited by the music rather than merely coached through it. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.
The Chopin Introduction and Polonaise brillante, op. 3, dates from 1830, which means Chopin was twenty when he wrote it — still five years older than Kułakowski when he recorded it here. Worth sitting with that arithmetic for a second. The piece is essentially an extrovert’s showpiece built on a cheerfully thin frame, and it wants a kind of fizzing impetuosity that this reading doesn’t quite achieve. The tempo is cautious. The roulades feel measured where they should feel thrown off with careless brilliance, the way Casals used to make even difficult passages sound like the only natural way to proceed. Still, there’s a musical intelligence at work in the phrasing — Kułakowski listens to Glapiak, responds, shapes the line — and that collaborative instinct is the most encouraging thing on the disc.
Which brings us to Prokofiev. The sonata — composed in 1950, near the end of a career throttled by Soviet cultural politics — is an extraordinary document, at once sarcastic and lyrical, rigorous and hauntingly ambiguous. The first movement is the great structural challenge: too long, potentially, if the cellist doesn’t maintain tension through its more ruminative stretches. Kułakowski begins warmly, and there are pages here that genuinely compel. But the pizzicato passage, underpinned by the piano’s dry, percussive hammering — a passage that in Rostropovich’s hands always sounded like boots on cobblestones, something military and menacing — comes across as merely decorative. The martial edge evaporates. In the slow movement, Kułakowski’s legato is lovely but monochrome; Prokofiev’s most characteristic quality in this movement is its tonal ambiguity, the way warmth curdles almost imperceptibly into something bleaker, and that drama of color goes mostly unrealized. The finale needs more elasticity in its phrasing — the rhythm wants to breathe, to tilt, not to march so squarely. Glapiak, for her part, is a strong and sensitive partner throughout, though I wished occasionally she had pushed harder.
The most consistently successful music-making on the disc is the Liszt. The six Consolations, in Jules de Swert’s 1873 arrangement for cello and piano, were not an obvious candidate for this treatment when de Swert devised it — Liszt’s originals are so pianistically conceived, so dependent on the sustaining pedal’s harmonic haze — but the transcription works, largely because it hands the cello a singing melodic line that the instrument was born to carry. Here Kułakowski and Glapiak achieve the closest rapport on the disc. The phrasing has a suppleness that’s sometimes absent in the bigger works, and the cellist’s tone in the middle register — warm, focused, never forced — is genuinely exquisite.
What to make of all this? There are real limitations here, and a responsible critic doesn’t airbrush them away just because the performer is young. But there are also real gifts — a natural sound, musical curiosity, the collaborative instinct that separates real chamber musicians from mere soloists. The Prokofiev needs several more years of living, of technical command, of acquaintance with what it feels like to have history lean on you. But Kułakowski will get there. This disc is less a finished statement than a promise — and it’s a serious one.
