Cello Suites: Cassado, Mayuzumi, Kodaly – Hayash

Some cellists play the Kodály Suite op. 8 as if it were a dare. Others play it as if it were a confession. Mineo Hayashi, on this Pavane disc recorded a decade ago in Brussels but only now crossing my desk, seems to regard it as something closer to an act of filial piety — an inheritance from Casals passed down through his teacher Yoshio Sato, the first Japanese player Casals ever accepted as a pupil. That lineage matters here. You can hear it in the unfussy directness of Hayashi’s bowing, the way he refuses to sentimentalize even the most anguished turns of Kodály’s writing.

The program itself is smartly conceived — not the usual solo-cello grab bag but a genuine arc, moving from Iberian sunlight through a curious Japanese half-light and into the Hungarian dark. Gaspar Cassadó’s Suite for cello, composed in the late 1920s when its author was still basking in Casals’s reflected glow (Cassadó was his prize pupil, later his musical son-in-law of sorts, then notoriously his estranged one after 1939), opens the disc with all the aromatic showmanship you’d expect from a virtuoso who understood the instrument’s theatrical possibilities better than most. The Preludio-Fantasia unfurls with unmistakably Iberian melodic curvature — you can practically smell the orange blossom — and Hayashi’s tone, lean almost to the point of astringency, suits the music’s high-wire tessitura. He doesn’t indulge the flourishes; he dispatches them, cleanly, almost matter-of-factly, which is its own kind of interpretive choice.

The Sardana that follows wants more. This is dance music with blood in it — voracious, Cassadó marked it, and he meant it — and while Hayashi finds the rhythmic snap easily enough, his palette here is narrower than the music demands. He has the pulse but not always the plumage. Compare this with the visceral abandon Cassadó himself apparently brought to his own writing (contemporaries described his playing as almost reckless in its color), and Hayashi’s account feels slightly buttoned-up, a gentleman observing a fiesta from the balcony rather than dancing in the square. The closing Intermezzo e Danza fares much better — here the folk-idiom writing sits more naturally under his fingers, and there’s a wiry elegance to the double-stops that I liked a great deal.

Then, an interlude of real curiosity: Toshiro Mayuzumi’s Bunkaru, from 1960, eight minutes of the cello impersonating a samisen. It’s an odd, haunting little essay — pizzicato underpinning, bent pitches, a vocal line that seems to arrive from behind a paper screen. Mayuzumi, who later made his name fusing Buddhist ritual with orchestral shock tactics in works like Nirvana Symphony, here works in miniature, and Hayashi — Tokyo-born himself, now a fixture of the Saito Kinen Orchestra under the discipline Ozawa demanded of that ensemble — plays it not as exoticism but as native speech. This is the disc’s most persuasive four minutes… well, eight, but it feels shorter. Time bends oddly in this piece, the way it does in Noh theater.

And then Kodály. The Suite op. 8 has attracted heroic advocacy since Kodály wrote it in 1915 for an instrument he professed, with typical bluntness, barely to understand — advocacy running from Janos Starker’s steel-cored authority to the febrile intensity Pablo Casals’s own circle brought to it secondhand, since Casals championed the piece without, so far as the records show, committing it to disc himself. Hayashi’s reading is intelligent, structurally sound, unfailingly musical — and yet it wants a degree more danger. The scordatura writing (that lowered C string, tuned down a whole step, groaning like an old door) is handled with real technical assurance, and the fugal-textured second movement has genuine sinew. But where Starker or, more recently, Steven Isserlis find something almost feral in the piece’s Magyar wildness, Hayashi remains poised, thoughtful, faintly Apollonian even at the score’s most Dionysian moments.

The engineering, from the RTBF studios in Flagey, is warm and true to the instrument without artificial bloom — you hear rosin dust, you hear the occasional creak of the chair. Small things. They matter.

This isn’t a first-choice Kodály, and the Cassadó has been better served elsewhere in outings of greater fire. But as a document of a serious, cultivated musician tracing his own artistic genealogy — Casals to Sato to Hayashi, East meeting West by way of Barcelona — it has real value, and the Mayuzumi alone is worth the price of admission for the curious.