Rachmaninov Cello Sonata – Doane and Snyder

Rachmaninov never quite trusted the cello. That may sound perverse given how lusciously he wrote for it, but consider: the Sonata in g minor, op. 19, composed in 1901 during the same extraordinary burst of energy that produced the Second Piano Concerto, is in some fundamental way a piano piece that happens to include a cello. The keyboard part is enormous, demanding, Romantic to its marrow. The cello sings — magnificently, at times — but it is singing against a current.

Which makes the balance of forces in any performance a genuinely difficult problem, and not merely a technical one.

Steven Doane and Barry Snyder are slow in the first movement. Strikingly so. Against the benchmark set by Lynn Harrell and Vladimir Ashkenazy on Decca — still, after all these years, the version most listeners reach for first — they run nearly two minutes longer, which in a single movement is not a small thing. And yet. The slowness doesn’t feel like indulgence so much as deliberation, a determination to let Rachmaninov’s long melodic arches breathe at their own pace rather than be pressed through the machine of virtuoso efficiency. There are moments when the music seems almost to stop moving — and then you realize it has been moving all along, very quietly, the way a river moves in winter.

Snyder is the revelation here. His performance of the complete second set of Études-Tableaux, op. 39, recorded — improbably, almost recklessly — in a single continuous take with only a handful of patches inserted afterward to cover studio noise, is playing of real distinction. The op. 39 études are among the most severe things Rachmaninov wrote; they belong to the dark period after he had left Russia and before he had fully found his footing in America, and they carry that displacement in their bones. The C major étude, with its relentless tolling figure, sounds here like something genuinely ominous. The A minor, marked alla marcia in the score, has a ferocity that Snyder doesn’t smooth over. He understands that these pieces resist charm — that Rachmaninov was, in this set, writing against his own reputation.

The programming, though, is puzzling.

Why only the second set? The op. 33 études, earlier and somewhat more transparent in texture, form a natural companion to the op. 39 group — they illuminate each other, and virtually every other album of this repertoire presents them together. Omitting op. 33 is a decision that will leave listeners vaguely unsatisfied, as though they’ve been handed one sleeve of a coat.

Similarly, of the two original pieces Rachmaninov wrote for cello and piano as op. 2, only the Danse orientale appears here — the Prélude is absent. The Lied of 1890, a student piece, is charming enough, a glimpse of the young composer before the catastrophic failure of his First Symphony had broken something in him. But its presence doesn’t compensate for the missing Prélude. One wonders what conversations, or silences, produced these omissions.

Doane plays with warmth and considerable sensitivity. His tone in the slow movement of the Sonata is genuinely lovely — he finds the long line without ever pushing it, and there is a moment near the movement’s center where the cello simply floats above Snyder’s harmonies, the kind of moment that reminds you why this instrument, in the right hands, can be heartbreaking. The finale is brisk without being rushed, and the two musicians seem genuinely engaged with each other rather than merely coordinated.

But the coupling — to use that old, useful word — remains a problem. If you want the complete Rachmaninov works for cello and piano, this disc doesn’t give them to you; the Harrell-Ashkenazy Decca still does that job better and more completely. If you want the op. 39 Études-Tableaux alone, Snyder’s interpretation merits serious attention, though he faces formidable competition from the likes of Ashkenazy and Howard Shelley in that repertoire. What this disc offers is something in between — partly satisfying, intelligently played, and oddly, inexplicably incomplete.

Rachmaninov deserves better than to be served in fragments.