Arpeggione Sonata - Schubert
Cello Sonata - Debussy
Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher - Henri Dutilleux
Sonata in A - Franck
The mere existence of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata has been enough to keep alive the memory of an unusual instrument invented by J.G. Staufer in Vienna in 1824. It looked rather like a bass viol, had metal frets like a guitar (whose tuning it also copied), and Vincenz Schuster, who played Schubert's sonata, was, in the words of The New Grove, "virtually its only professional exponent".
These days, the sonata is espoused by viola players or cellists - and a few flautists, too. But it doesn't often seem to fit any of them as comfortably as it did the French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras at St Canice's Cathedral on Friday. Queyras, principal cellist of the Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain, played with a lightness of touch and an unstrained fluency in the high register which allowed this most catchy of sonatas to speak with unusual freedom and immediacy.
That said, there was at various times the feeling that Queyras and his partner at the piano, Alexandre Tharaud, were lavishing on the music resources which were unlikely ever to have been in Schubert's mind, and a similar embarass de richesses could be felt in the late Cello Sonata of Debussy.
Henri Dutilleux was one of a number of composers commissioned by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to celebrate the 70th birthday of the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher in 1976. The distinguished list also included Berio, Boulez, Britten, Ginastera, Henze and Lutoslawski, and all save Boulez wrote for solo cello. In 1982 Dutilleux added two further movements to his original Strophe, to create an effective concert work, often dark (the cello's two lower strings are retuned downwards) but ending in extrovert mode.
Queyras's rich colouristic resources were here entirely apt. And he managed to make the Franck sonata sound about as persuasive as I've heard it in anything other than its original version for violin.
There was more distinguished string playing at lunchtime, by viol player Sarah Cunningham, in a new venue, the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle.
