Lost in Transcription: Sonatas and Songs in Transformation (LP)

Description

In the very title of this recording project there seems to linger the suggestion that something is irretrievably forfeited in the passage from one instrument to another. In truth, the itinerary from Ravel through Grieg to Gershwin demonstrates how transcription may become not only an enriching operation, but also an act of knowledge: a lens that brings the object closer, refracts and magnifies it, revealing hidden veins within the fabric of the scores. The cello, assuming pages originally conceived for the violin or for the voice – Ravel’s Sonate posthume and Kaddish, Grieg’s Violin Sonata no. 3, three numbers from Porgy and Bess – is by no means a mere surrogate, but rather a true protagonist which contests with the violin the prerogative of brilliance and with the voice the privilege of the word, without ever disowning its own timbral identity.
The Sonate posthume for violin and piano constitutes Ravel’s first foray into the sonata form within the chamber domain. Composed during his years of study at the Conservatoire in Paris, while the pupil of Fauré and Gedalge was absorbing the lessons of the French school, it remained for decades a virtually submerged memory of Conservatoire life. Various testimonies, also taken up by Italian criticism, suggest that the piece was performed in an academic context with Ravel at the piano and Georges Enesco on the violin, only to vanish from concert programmes until its publication in the 1970s. An autograph that has recently come to light does not refer to a posthumous sonata, but to an unfinished sonata: what is heard today as an autonomous piece is, in origin, the first movement of a sonata left at the stage of fragment, whose score is preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. From the stylistic point of view, the work adheres to the classical tripartite design of exposition, development and recapitulation, with a first theme that is sweet and cantabile and has often been compared by critics, in its overall contour, to the opening theme of the future Trio op. 67 for piano, violin and cello; the harmonic writing reveals a clear debt to the lyricism of Fauré, filtered through a taste already characteristically Ravelian for timbral detail and modal ambiguity. It is precisely this experimental, almost exploratory nature that renders the transcription for cello particularly eloquent: while the piano part remains unaltered, the line originally destined for the violin is rewritten within a texture that privileges the continuity of the cantilena and the depth of the middle-low register. One does not receive the impression of a simple lowering of the upper part, but rather of a shift of perspective: the same discourse is entrusted to a more inward voice, less dazzling in the surface sheen, but all the denser in substance.
A comparable interplay of distance and proximity characterises Kaddish, the first of the Deux mélodies hébraïques. Ravel approaches this material not as a mere harmoniser of a traditional chant, but as a composer who reinvents it, drawing inspiration from the inflections of synagogue cantillation without literally reproducing the ritual chant of the Kaddish: the vocal line assimilates intervallic formulae and declamatory accents of the prayer, translating them into a flow of melismas supported by bell-like chords in the piano. In Mario Bortolotto’s well-known formulation, this page is an “invaluable forgery” of the nasal synagogue style; it is hardly accidental that it was precisely the Deux mélodies hébraïques that, in the 1930s, were flaunted as evidence of the composer’s alleged “non-Aryan” descent, to which he replied with the ironic wish to share the fate of Mendelssohn. Transposed to the cello, Kaddish withdraws from the literal textual dimension, yet gains a kind of interiorisation of the rite. The instrument’s low register assumes the weight of a silent recitative, while the surges into the high register, which in the sung version reproduced the inflections of a hazzan, become ascensional thrusts in which the melodic line seems almost to fracture under the burden of the invocation. Ravel’s writing, which in the relationship between voice and piano already played upon an unstable equilibrium between improvisatory freedom and formal control, thus finds in the cello an ideal interpreter of the ambiguity between liturgical page and secular meditation on the value of remembrance.
With Edvard Grieg’s Violin Sonata no. 3, the centre of gravity of the programme shifts northwards, yet the underlying tension between rootedness and transfiguration remains unchanged. Grieg himself regarded this sonata, in comparison with the two earlier ones, as more “international” in language and at the same time steeped in Norwegian elements, as though reference to folklore had by then become a natural and inalienable component of his writing. In the opening Allegro molto ed appassionato, the impetuosity of the first theme is combined with a second subject of warm cantabilità; the central movement, Allegretto espressivo alla romanza, attains an almost domestic simplicity, with a melody delicately suspended over a sober and discreet piano accompaniment; the finale, Allegro animato, reworks popular dance idioms, transfiguring them into a headlong, almost breathless, rush. The history of the transcriptions of this sonata casts a particular light on Grieg’s relationship with the cello. The existence is documented of a version of the Allegretto espressivo alla romanza for cello and piano based on autograph material, in which the solo part is entirely in the composer’s hand, while the keyboard retains, with only minimal adjustments, its original physiognomy. Recent editions have extended this perspective to the sonata as a whole, offering versions for cello that implicitly enter into dialogue with the Cello Sonata in A minor and with other chamber works by the composer; the transcription considered here furthermore introduces a brief cadenza between the first and second movements and an added modulation at the heart of the Allegretto, which creates a moment of harmonic suspension absent from the violin score. The outcome is a particularly continuous three-stage journey, in which the cello assumes the role of sole narrator of a tale that alternates tempest, confidence and dance.
The final section of the disc is devoted to three numbers from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: Summertime, It ain’t necessarily so and My man’s gone now. This work, conceived as a “folk opera” and also the fruit of a sojourn of several weeks on Folly Island to experience at close quarters the language and music of the Gullah community, interweaves spirituals, blues, work songs and compositional techniques derived both from European symphonism and from the Broadway musical theatre. Summertime, a lullaby sung by Clara at the beginning of the first act, is often described as a new spiritual: an almost entirely pentatonic line unfolds over slow harmonies with a pronounced blues flavour, in an underground dialogue with the spiritual Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, while still respecting Gershwin’s declared intention not to quote pre-existing songs literally.
Even more intricate is the cultural stratification of It ain’t necessarily so, entrusted on stage to the equivocal and seductive figure of Sportin’ Life. Beneath its brilliant, jazz-inflected surface, the melody takes up the profile of a synagogue blessing that introduces the reading of the Torah, including the congregation’s choral response; several studies have recognised in the piece the presence of the liturgical mode known as Adonai malakh, with the insistence on the major third and the minor seventh that also characterises certain traditional cantorial intonations. Gershwin, the son of Jewish immigrants and yet deeply immersed in the African American culture of Catfish Row, thus intertwines two sound memories: that of the synagogue and that of the Black community of the American South, transforming an apparently light-hearted song into a place of tension between faith, scepticism and irony.
My man’s gone now, Serena’s lament, brings this dialectic between different roots to its apex: around DuBose Heyward’s verses, among the most exalted in twentieth-century musical theatre, Gershwin constructs an aria in which blues lament, spiritual and tragic operatic aria converge into one great, unbroken span. It is hardly surprising that these pages have generated a wide and enduring tradition of instrumental transcriptions: it suffices to recall the suite and the paraphrases for violin and piano by Jascha Heifetz, or Igor Frolov’s concert fantasy on themes from Porgy and Bess. In continuity with this lineage, yet with a different timbral equilibrium, the reduction for cello and piano adopted here takes the orchestral score as its point of departure and entrusts to the cello both the principal vocal lines and certain original instrumental interventions.
What unites these apparently distant experiences is the idea that transcription may be understood as a form of creative criticism. In the case of Ravel, the cello brings into sharp relief the inner dimension of the Sonate posthume and of Kaddish; in Grieg, the transformation of the Violin Sonata no. 3 into a narrative for cello and piano illuminates the dialogue between Nordic cantabilità and formal construction; in Gershwin, finally, the chamber reworking of Summertime, It ain’t necessarily so and My man’s gone now allows us to listen at close quarters to the interweaving of spiritual, blues, cantillation and operatic style that constitutes the deep fabric of Porgy and Bess. Far from being “lost” in transcription, these pieces of music rediscover in the warm and mobile voice of the cello a new centre of gravity, in which historical memory, cultural geographies and sonic invention maintain a fragile and, precisely for this reason, intensely vital balance.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2025