Hans Gál Late Cello Works – Premiere Recordings

Hans Gál lived to be 97, and he never stopped composing. That fact alone should give us pause — not because longevity is unusual among creative artists, but because the music he was writing in his final years sounds nothing like the work of a man watching the century close around him. The two solo cello works from 1982, composed when Gál was 92, arrive on disc here in what appears to be their premiere recordings, and they are astonishing: not as curiosities, not as documents of stubborn survival, but as music.

Gál had been living in Edinburgh since 1945, having fled Austria after the Anschluss, and Scotland lodged itself in him the way exile sometimes does — not replacing what was lost but adding a new color to the palette. The late solo pieces carry something of that northern clarity, that particular quality of light over open water. They are contrapuntally spare where the earlier cello sonata is harmonically lush, though even “spare” is a relative term here. Gál’s counterpoint is always singing.

The Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 89, dates from 1953 — a full thirty years earlier — and it is a different kind of piece entirely. Brahms is the obvious ancestor, the slow movement especially breathing that particular late-Romantic air where melancholy and contentment have learned to coexist without embarrassment. But Gál is not Brahms, and it would be condescending to leave the comparison there. There’s a wit in the finale, a certain lightness of foot, that belongs entirely to Gál’s own voice — the voice of a man who understood irony without being consumed by it.

Nakipbekova plays all three works, and her pianist joins her for the op. 89. She is a cellist worth knowing. Her tone in the lower register has real body without turning muddy, and in the solo works she sustains long lines with a bow arm that seems completely unhurried — which is harder than it sounds, especially in music that asks the player to be its own accompanist, to generate the harmonic resonance that would otherwise float up from a keyboard. The disc was made, apparently, in Orkney, which is either a poetic choice or a practical one; either way, the acoustic suits the music.

What’s missing is context. The program runs short, and one wishes that someone had thought to include Gál’s early Suite for Cello and Piano, op. 6, from 1919 — that would have framed the solo works in a way that illuminated the full arc. To hear where he began and where he ended, with the 1953 sonata as the hinge, would have made for a more complete argument about why this composer matters.

He does matter. The orchestral revival — Kenneth Woods in particular has done valuable work — is real and overdue, but the chamber music deserves its own advocates. The Sonata for Solo Cello and the Suite for Solo Cello are not the work of a composer in decline, not Indian summer stuff, not the touching efforts of an old man at his desk. They are fully achieved, fully alive. Gál shunned modernism, yes — shunned it deliberately, on principle, not from ignorance or fear. Whether that counts against him depends entirely on whether you think the history of music is a progress narrative. It isn’t. This disc makes the case quietly but unmistakably.

Thoroughly recommended.