Cellist Carter Brey:
Huge, muscular, robust musicianship
October 21, 2008To set the record straight, Carter Brey’s cello did not bear a “Stratocaster” label, and he did not set it ablaze in his recital with pianist Christopher O’Riley, Oct. 20 in Travis Park United Methodist Church.
Not literally, anyway. Figuratively? That’s another matter. In sonatas by Richard Strauss, Francis Poulenc and Frederic Chopin, Brey generated a hard-driving, kinetic, go-for-broke intensity that Jimi Hendrix might approve. Why aren’t more classical concerts like this?
All three of the works on this Tuesday Musical Club presentation were a little out of the way. Strauss was represented by his very early and mostly very Brahmsian Sonata in F, which hints of Strauss’s mature style only in the skittering lines of the quick finale. Poulenc’s Sonata for Cello and Piano was one of only two of his chamber-music essays to include strings. Chopin’s Sonata in G Minor was his last completed major work and one of very few chamber works he composed for cello. For an encore, the pair offered Astor Piazzolla’s Grand Tango.
Brey’s playing throughout was huge, muscular and robust. He invested his music with an almost embodied physicality; the line leaped, pounced and spun like a champion gymnast. Brey projected a big, bright tone, rich with overtones and glazed with a perfect vibrato. His amazingly confident left hand was dead-accurate in its aim, and he knew unfailingly when to aim a smidgen high or low to give a line a meaningful inflection or, in the elegiacal second movement of Poulenc’s sonata, to underscore a harmonic coloration. This was musicianship at once cogent and viscerally exciting.
O’Riley’s playing was a size smaller, but consistently focused, stylish and responsive to his partner.
Mike
Greenberg
