Debussy Cello Sonata, Prokofiev Cello Sonata. Piazzola Le Grand Tango: Claudia Jablonski cello and Rustam Khanmurzin piano
Claudia Jablonski is a British-Swedish cellist and conductor from London. She was a scholarship holder at the Royal Academy of Music and has performed in various venues around Europe, though this was her first appearance at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Rustam Khanmurzin is a former Junior Fellow at Royal College of Music and he has appeared in a number of festivals with solo, chamber and concerto programmes all across Eurasia. He’s also made recordings.
The biggest work in this hour-long recital was the Prokofiev, not a work I know. I was reading a book about his first wife, who led a remarkable life – before meeting him she lived in Switzerland, Spain, the Crimea and USA, they finally married and she moved with him to Paris in the late 20’s, and then on to Moscow in the early 1930’s. They were divorced in the early 1940’s, she spent 8 years or so in a gulag, his children were estranged from him, and altogether Prokofiev comes across in the book as a self-absorbed, unsympathetic and insensitive individual. Somehow this comes across to me in this music – this was written just after the Union of Soviet Composers denunciation of him in 1948, his health was not good, and his first wife was just into her first year of the camps, yet the music moves blithely along in good humour, as though nothing had really happened. I found it difficult to like it and unmemorable. The Debussy cello sonata I found much more interesting – alert, alive, quirky. I’d like to hear it again. The Piazolla I think I have heard in other versions for different instruments – it’s always fun to listen to, with more changes of mood and colour than you might think beforehand
The musicians were very fine – everything as it should be.
John's musical journey 