LANDSCAPE OF SHADOWS

Cellist Laura van der Heijden talks to Tom Stewart about the subtle, often other-worldly atmosphere inhabited by Czech and Hungarian music in her new recording with pianist Jâms Coleman

Pohádka, the title of Janáček’s 1910 work for cello and piano, might be translated into English as ‘Fairy Tale’.

Like much of the Czech composer’s music, it takes listeners – and performers – through a landscape of shadows and shifting sands where tonalities, moods and motifs vanish as unexpectedly as they appear.

The work gives its title to a new disc of Czech and Hungarian music by English cellist Laura van der Heijden and Welsh pianist Jâms Coleman, which spans everything from a song by Dvořák to András Mihály’s angular Mouvement (1963), via Janáček, Kodály and Navždy (‘Forever’), a brief song by Vítězslava Kaprálová, a Czech woman who died in 1940 aged just 25.

‘There’s a unique flavour to this repertoire that’s very hard to put your finger on,’ van der Heijden says. ‘It’s other-worldly and even sometimes slightly grotesque but always so full of colour.’ She and Coleman were already performing Pohádka and Kodály’s Sonatina, and were keen to explore further when the project with record label Chandos began to develop. ‘I wanted to avoid programmes that people had done already, but there isn’t so much music written for the cello, so it’s not as if you can make new discoveries all the time,’ she explains. The duo turned to vocal music by Dvořák, Kaprálová and Kodály, as well as some lesser-known corners of the cello repertoire. ‘It was such a pleasure to find music that fits so well into a programme and is also fun to play.’

STEPHANE CRAYTON

‘THERE’S A STRANGE LIGHTNESS THAT SHINES OUT OF THE DARK, ALMOST LIKE A KIND OF ESCAPE’

One such find was Mihály’s nineminute Mouvement. ‘I don’t know if I can choose a favourite piece on the disc, but this was definitely the gem I didn’t know I was going to love so much,’ van der Heijden says. András Mihály, who died in 1993, was a cellist and composer born in Budapest in 1917. Although he had a successful career as a performer and pedagogue – he taught all four original members of the Takács Quartet, for example – his music remains little known, even inside Hungary. ‘Miklós Perényi is the only other cellist to have recorded Mouvement, and I’m very grateful to him because without that reference point I think it would be a very difficult piece to get your head around as a performer. It’s completely crazy, real balls-to-the-wall stuff.’

Better known are Kodály’s op.8 Sonata for cello and piano and Dvořák’s nostalgic ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’ (from the cycle Gypsy Songs) which appears on the disc in a new arrangement by van der Heijden herself. The final work on the disc is a version of Janáček’s Violin Sonata, a piece written some five years after Pohádka and which can also make listeners feel as if they have tumbled head first into the folk drama of a Bohemian woodcut.

Although she is listed in the CD booklet as the arranger, van der Heijden doesn’t really see it that way. ‘Most of the time I just play the violin part down an octave!’ she explains. ‘I was worried that it needed the shrillness of the violin E string, but actually I don’t think it sounds too soft on the cello, even if there are one or two places where the colour is perhaps a little different. I’m curious to see what the response to it is like – when you mess with a piece that’s so well known, people are either going to love it or hate it.’

Van der Heijden’s debut CD, 1948, of music from mid-20th-century Russia, also tapped into a time and place with a distinctive sound world. ‘The music on that disc is strong and from the heart. But with this Czech and Hungarian repertoire there’s a strange lightness that shines out of the dark, almost like a kind of escape.’ In both cases, she says, the motivation was the music itself, not the nationalities of its composers. ‘Ideas for programmes on disc are tricky to come up with and even harder to put into practice. It was this balance of light and dark that I wanted, and the idiosyncratic sound of this repertoire just happens to be exactly right.’ Once it transpired the foundations of the programme came from the same region, she says, it made sense to stay there.

‘ESPECIALLY WITH THIS REPERTOIRE, I WAS ADAMANT THAT MY CELLO SHOULD SOUND AS RAW AS POSSIBLE’

Jâms Coleman and Laura van der Heijden in Suffolk for the sessions

OLIVIA DA COSTA

Van der Heijden and Coleman might be the only names on the cover of the disc, but the cellist says the work of a third person made all the difference. ‘The producer isn’t just crucial for the quality of the recorded sound. Because they know how to navigate the tensions that are inevitable in any recording environment, the way the whole thing turns out depends on their input. The point comes when you just have to relinquish control to them. If they say they need another take, great. If they don’t, you have to trust their judgement.’ For Pohádka, van der Heijden and Coleman worked with Chandos’s Jonathan Cooper. ‘He was brilliant,’ she says. ‘Thanks to him I don’t think we sound any different from how we would in a live performance that went really well.’ The pair wanted to avoid the almost sterile quality of some highly polished recordings and worked with Cooper to create a more immediate, harder-edged sound. ‘Especially with this repertoire, I was adamant that my cello should sound as raw as possible. I wanted to do justice to the colours Jâms was creating on the piano, too, as it was so good to play alongside someone else who felt equally passionate about the music we were playing and the sounds we could bring to it.’

Shortly after recording Pohádka, van der Heijden was back in the studio as part of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, an experience that would prove fortuitous. ‘Jonathan was the producer on that recording too, and I was really lucky that my deadline for edits to the Pohádka tracks came at the same time,’ she says. ‘Usually you do this kind of thing by email, but that can make it really hard to describe tiny differences in shade and sound quality.

It was the ability to talk about it in person that really allowed us to get exactly the right sound for each track.

Without that experience I think it would have been quite a different disc.

Pohádka: Tales from Prague to Budapest is reviewed on page 88

WORKS Janáček Pohádka; Violin Sonata in A flat minor (arr. Heijden) Kodály Sonata op.4; Sonatina (1909); Why are you saying you don’t love me? op. posth. no.1 (arr. Heijden); Slender Is a Silk Thread op.1 no.9 (arr. Heijden) Dvořák Als die alte Mutter op.55 no.4 (arr. Heijden) Mihály Mouvement (1963) Kaprálová Navždy op.12 no.1 ARTISTS Laura van der Heijden (vc) Jâms Coleman (pf) RECORDING VENUE Potton Hall, Dunwich, Suffolk RECORDING DATES 24–26 July 2021