Review: Canellakis-Brown Duo at UU Congregation of Asheville
Nicholas Canellakis and Michael Stephen Brown are something of odd ducks in the world of modern classical music. The cellist and pianist are accomplished interpreters of established repertoire, but they are also composers who write for themselves, performing their original works on programs around the world as the Canellakis-Brown Duo.
Canellakis reminded a packed house at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Asheville on May 10, however, that this sort of musical switch-hitting was once the rule rather than the exception. The greatest composers of the classical canon, like J.S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, were also revered as performers. And touring virtuosi like Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt composed showpieces that remain concert mainstays.
The duo is doing its best to revive that tradition, as evidenced by the program chosen for its Asheville Chamber Music Series performance. The self-described “eclectic” collection, drawn largely from the material recorded on their recently released album, (b)romance, included new works by both Brown and Canellakis alongside the classics.
Yet as hinted by that album’s title, the performers are especially drawn to the music of the Romantic period. The emotional works of these mid-19th and early 20th-century composers match well with the duo’s natural proclivities for drama and showmanship.
The meatiest piece on the program, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 1901 Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano, exemplified that stylistic match. Canellakis thrived when interpreting the composer’s flowing lines, bringing out the long arc of each phrase with his cello’s insistent crescendos. His bow seemed to swoop and dive through the melodic canyons, as if he were defining the wings of some powerful desert bird.
Brown excelled at simultaneously defining texture and movement throughout the sonata. Again, my thoughts flew to atmospheric metaphors: His light pianistic touch sent Rachmaninoff’s rich chords billowing out like storm clouds, but his precise articulation of the composer’s melodies gave those cumulonimbi distinct, bright edges. And in the concluding movement, the motion of the cello and piano together propelled the whole thundering stormfront across the mind’s sky.
Perhaps paradoxically, I found the night’s least successful pieces to be the least technically challenging. “Romance in F Major” by Camille Saint-Saëns, for example, features a lovely cello melody, clear chordal architecture for the piano, and relatively little drama.
Canellakis and Brown performed the work without a sweat, but I sensed almost a touch of impatience from the cellist. He craves music with panache, humor, and stylistic chutzpah, and he was less comfortable just dwelling in the sincerity of Saint-Saëns. The cellist’s own composition, “Romance à GF,” which he described as “a bit of a dreamscape,” also felt a bit unfocused with its meditatively wandering lines.
I found Brown’s original work, “Spinning Song,” a better fit for the duo’s strength. He tasked Canellakis with propulsive four-string arpeggios and intriguing double-stop harmonies, while giving himself sparkling piano parts that ranged from the highest to lowest keys. The style was more modern than Romantic, but it retained the earlier era’s flair for the dramatic.
And the two absolutely nailed the difficult compositions at the end of their program. Canellakis blazed through “Variations on a Theme by Rossini from ‘Moses in Egypt’” with lightning precision, his digits a blur up and down the fingerboard.
At times he flashed an insouciant smile toward Brown, as if daring the piano to keep up with the cello’s tightrope act. That swagger continued into “Bulgarian Bulge,” a folk-inspired whirlwind in the unusual time signature of 33/8 by jazz composer Don Ellis. Canellakis had called the piece his “psychotic arrangement” of Ellis’s original, but everything about its energy and verve made perfectly delightful sense to me.
(Photo by Arabella Oz)
