{TABLE} Cello Sonata ....................... Prokofiev Variations on a theme of ........... Rossini Martinu Cello Sonata ....................... Shostakovich {/TABLE} THE name and face of Simon Webb will be familiar to orchestral concertgoers in Dublin. He's been playing in the cello section of the National Symphony Orchestra for about 18 months, before which he was a member of the Hong Kong Philharmonic (activities preceded, according to his biographical note, by a degree in theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge and cello studies at the Royal Academy of Music in that order).
At the John Field Room last night he was joined by pianist Dearbhla Collins in a programme of 20th century music from the east two Russian sonatas and a set of variations by the Czech, Martinu.
He offered the music in reverse chronological order, opening with Prokofiev's Sonata for cello and piano, completed in 1949 and as freeflowingly lyrical as anything in the ballet Romeo and Juliet or Peter and the Wolf Martinu wrote his impishly cheeky Variations on a theme of Rossini in 1942, during the early days of his exile in the US, when the attention of the great conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky, was leading the composer to write the first of his six symphonies.
The official Soviet line on Shostakovich's Cello Sonata of 1934 was that it was "like a sudden ray of sunshine" "brightening up" what was described as the "dismal grotesquerie of his operas or the sarcastic eccentricities of his orchestral suites". Certainly, the sweetness and straight forward vivacity of the sonata can be seen as a turning point in the composer's move away from the style of composition that was to bring him into direct conflict with Stalin himself.
Simon Webb revealed himself as a player with a natural lyrical gift and an interesting, honeyed low register. Nerves may have accounted for his proneness to accident, but the most serious limitations of the evening lay elsewhere. The interest of this short (little more than lunchtime length) programme was severely compromised by the musical stance of the pianist, whose style of playing (which was by no means lacking in agility) seemed to be dictated by the desire to keep in time but otherwise stay out of the way.
These concerns may well have been dictated by the well known problems of balancing cello and piano, but, if so, on this occasion the cure was worse than the disease. Often the reticence of the piano was such that the harmonic foundation of the music was seriously obscured, and any sense of musical give and take between equals was rarely apparent.
