Franchomme Cello Music – Louise Dubin

Auguste Franchomme is one of those figures who haunt the margins of music history — indispensable to his contemporaries, nearly invisible to ours. Chopin’s closest friend among musicians, the dedicatee of the op. 65 cello sonata, a performer of legendary refinement in his day, he has left almost no trace in the standard concert repertoire. Which makes Louise Dubin’s patient, passionate campaign to restore him something close to a cause — and, on this new Bridge disc, something close to a triumph.

The program is nominally a survey of French cello music across roughly a century and a half. But Franchomme is the spine of it, the gravitational center, and Dubin clearly loves this music with the kind of love that clarifies rather than flatters. Her tone is lean and focused, not the plush, vibrato-saturated sound some listeners expect from French repertoire. That’s a choice, and it’s the right one.

Start with the Koechlin — which is where the disc starts, and shrewdly so. Charles Koechlin remains one of the great underestimated figures of the French tradition, a composer of enormous range and seriousness who spent much of his career in the shadow of his more celebrated pupils and colleagues. His Sonate pour violoncelle et piano, op. 66, is a beautifully conceived work — modal in its harmonic language, spacious in its architecture, with a first movement whose quiet gravity can catch you completely off guard if you aren’t paying attention. Dubin and Spencer Myer find exactly the right tone here: unhurried, clear-eyed, harmonically sensitive. Myer’s playing in the first movement is particularly fine, the shifting harmonic colors of the piano part emerging with a transparency that avoids any suggestion of impressionist blur. This is not easy music to make sound inevitable, and they make it sound inevitable.

Then there is the Franchomme transcription of the Chopin Étude, op. 25, no. 7 — a piece with a genuinely strange genealogy. The étude is itself built on the haunting cello solo that opens Act Two of Norma, and Franchomme, who played that solo in the Paris premiere at the Théâtre-Italien in 1835, presumably knew it better than anyone alive. He would have drawn that bow across the strings night after night through the long run of performances; the melody was in his fingers, in his sleep. His transcription, then, is less an arrangement than a kind of homecoming — Bellini’s line returning to the instrument that first sang it in Paris, shaped by the hands that first shaped it there. Dubin and Myer give a beautifully poised account, the long singing line never forced, the piano’s accompanying figurations kept refined and subordinate. It is one of the loveliest things on the disc.

Dubin is joined by Julia Bruskin for the works requiring two cellos — the brief Fauré Allegro moderato, the Franchomme Nocturne, op. 14, no. 2, and the Philippe Hersant Caprices. The Fauré is charming precisely because it doesn’t try to be more than charming; Dubin and Bruskin play it with the easy warmth of musicians who know when not to push. The Hersant Caprices inhabit a very different world — darker, more angular, with a sardonic undertow that sits interestingly against the nineteenth-century works surrounding it. Bruskin and Dubin negotiate the ensemble writing with precision and an evident mutual attentiveness.

The highlight, though — and I say this without much hesitation — is the Franchomme Air Irlandais varié, op. 25, no. 3, for cello and piano. Franchomme had a genuine gift for this kind of variation writing, and the piece has a buoyancy, a barely restrained exuberance, that Dubin seizes with both hands. The playing here has real lift to it. You feel the joy.

Bridge’s engineering is exemplary throughout. The cello is captured with unusual transparency in the lower register — that resonant, slightly bronzed quality the instrument takes on below the staff comes through with real presence, not the woolliness that mediocre disc can impose. The piano sits slightly back in the soundstage, which gives the whole thing a sense of acoustic air without sacrificing clarity.

This is distinguished work on behalf of music that deserves a wider hearing. Buy it.