DVOŘÁK CELLO CONCERTO FIRST MOVEMENT

Cellist Hannah Roberts looks to subtlety and nuance in the quest to communicate this titan of the repertoire with mastery

From Dvořák Cello Concerto in B minor, op.104. Urtext edition, paperbound, with marked and unmarked string parts. Ed. Annette Oppermann. Pf reduction Johannes Umbreit. Vcl bowing & fingering Steven Isserlis. Order no. HN 1185. ISMN 979-0-2018-1185-7. €20.00. Printed with permission of G. Henle Verlag, München © 2021

This concerto is a work that sets the cello in the traditional hero role, often accompanied by the orchestra, but which also contains tremendous elements of chamber music with the orchestra. While making great demands in terms of stamina and facility, it is nonetheless one of the most thrilling and exhilarating works to perform, and has a superb shape as a whole. The coda at the end of the third movement brings together a touching tribute to Josefina, Dvořák’s first love, and a sense that the cello, as hero figure, is able to stand all they have conquered.

Finding nuance

At the beginning we have a limited amount of time to tune the ears of the audience to finer details. The soloist’s entry is only marked forte and it’s important while making it sound assertive not to let it sound forced. Five bars later the restatement, which is higher in pitch and marked fortissimo, can be played more strongly – with lungfuls of air as if you were a singer – but in the first phrase there are more subtleties to bring out. To highlight the different shapes of the first two bars, it helps to angle the bow arm weight up away from the D string on the first note of bar 87, which naturally points to ascending notes, and let the arm weight lean towards the D string on the first note of bar 88, which points to the descending notes. With arm weight angled upwards upper overtones develop, and with it angled downwards, the tone is darker. This maximises nuance in louder sounds and shows the symmetrical contour of the phrase.

Inhabiting the dance character with clarity

There is such a lot of dance in this piece as well as the drama, which starts to develop in the solo part at bar 95. The mix of slurred and detached articulation contributes to what makes it so joyful and effervescent but also quite awkward to play! Noticing how the bow is balanced when it hits the string is important, and if we think of the buoyancy of the forzando it allows us to draw more resonance through the short notes. To play it elegantly we also need to take care of bow distribution and use the right-hand fingers rather than just the arm to make the slurs, because if you only concentrate on lateral movement then the detail tends to get lost. The heroic figure in bars 170–171 is another case in point.

THE SOLOIST

COURTESY MANCHESTER CAMERATA

• NAME HANNAH ROBERTS

• NATIONALITY BRITISH

• STUDIED WITH SUSANNA ROBERTS, WILLIAM PLEETH, RALPH KIRSHBAUM

• RECORDS FOR DECCA AND ASV

‘Emphasising up-beats rather than down-beats can add so much humour and lightness’

Roberts was recently appointed as Jacqueline du Pré Professor of Cello at the Royal Academy of Music in London, in addition to her position as Professor of Cello at the RNCM in Manchester. She will perform the Dvořák Cello Concerto in the 2024–25 season with the Manchester Camerata conducted by Gabor Takacs-Nagy.

Metric ambiguity

There are many instances where it’s good to consider all the potential internal patterns inside groups – threes or fours within twelve for example – and sometimes it’s nice to be aware of those things without nailing any colour to the mast permanently. Letting the audience simply feel there is a kind of swing in bars 97–98, for example, means those bars can act as one big up-beat to the important held F sharp in bar 99.

The variation in bar 110 is full of dance and we work to make this distinct from the lyrical character and make sure that the articulation is clear. Here again is a brilliant opportunity to bring out different groupings so that in bar 111 and similar places you can group in fours across the beat, emphasising up-beats rather than down-beats. It can add so much humour and lightness to what can otherwise be a fairly ‘foursquare’ scale sequence. Although this variation isn’t repeated in the recapitulation, the cross-beat idea really helps at bar 332–333 in the coda too.

Explore intervals to enliven repetition

Whether for rhetoric or balance, we need to consider how we interpret repetition and deal with it instrumentally. In bars 120–121 the material is written in pairs of quavers (e) meaning we are looking at the relationship present in those four intervals, each of which contains several choices of expression. In the first bar we might lean on the first note of each pair and in the second bar we might choose to sing through the second note each time. This approach can really help where there is more dense repetition, like the paired semiquavers (s) in bars 174–175, 183 and the corresponding places in the recapitulation, including bar 339–340 in the coda. It doesn’t have to be all about the note of arrival!

Allow left arm weight and bow to shape the phrase

The challenge with the second subject from bar 140 is to control the speed of the bow in service of the longer lines, rather than allowing lots of peaks and troughs, and I feel it should be driven by the harmony. We have a very clear bass-line and then some lovely chromatic movement, which is a chance for the cellist to maximise colour and nuance by varying bow speed, vibrato speed and also left-hand weight to create different timbres. A good example of that would be the first long F sharp, where the harmony changes in the middle of the note. If we lean our weight in just as the harmony changes, the vibrato blooms in a slightly different way and when you combine that with changes of bow speed and pressure, then you really have got the full range of nuance in the sound. We tend to think about weight changes in the bow, not the left hand, but adjustments to left-hand weight can really alter overtones dramatically.

Changing the metabolism of the sound

Just before the second subject melts into the next passage, Dvořák marks forte animato at bar 154, which I believe is less about a radical tempo change than increasing the energy. More bow speed can change the metabolism of the sound and indicate the end of the phrase with a brief increase in activity as we approach figure 6. Bars 132–138 are similar in an opposing way, where the più tranquillo is about slowing the metabolism rather than the tempo, and we can use a slower bow to achieve this. It is tempting to lengthen or exaggerate tempo changes at transitions throughout the movement but I think Dvořák has created the proportions beautifully, and all the tempos work really well as written.

Tempo 1 at bar 158 (bar 285 in the recapitulation) brings significant technical challenges and it helps to remember that the cello is accompanying at this point and we need to support the wind soloists’ phrasing. This means making more of the dynamic shaping to support their lines, which also helps with projection in a passage where the cellist can easily get lost otherwise.

After a mighty battle with the orchestra that concludes the exposition, figure 10 sees us as far from home as it’s possible to be, harmonically speaking, and the shivering tremolo accompaniment and spare texture compound the beautiful but wintry feeling. To this we can add subtle variations in timbre by exploring ‘pre-vibrato’, i.e. changes in left-arm weight and balance in the hand in a similar way to the long lines of the second subject.

Harnessing power with ease

Travelling through the progressions from bar 240 playing our broken chord accompaniment, we are given plenty of scope when practising to refine the intonation by being aware of the different balance and angles of the hand at different places on the fingerboard. From figure 12, the scent of an impending arrival calls for increasing power, and as we move up the fingerboard at the same time, it helps to ensure we increase our tonal power by moving from the hip joints, rather than hunching the shoulders. Finally arriving in B major at bar 267 with the now impassioned second subject material, this moment is an explosion of joy shared by orchestra and soloist.

The adversarial and the co-operative, the heroic and lyrical are ideas woven through the recapitulation just as they are in the first half of the movement, and the coda brings everything to a victorious and virtuosic conclusion. As soloists we need to find ways to create variety on a large scale, projecting through the use of colours, textures and amplified articulation in a way that transcends plain volume, creating compelling music making from the first note we play.

INTERVIEW BY HELENA RUINARD