United Kingdom Various: Laura van der Heijden (cello) and Jâms Coleman (piano). Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 31.1.2025. (LJ)

Debussy – Cello Sonata in D minor
Britten – ‘Sonetto XXX’ from Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo
Florence Price – ‘Night’
Tōru Takemitsu – ‘Will Tomorrow, I Wonder, Be Cloudy or Clear?’
Korngold – ‘Die Schönste Nacht’
Britten – Cello Sonata in C major
At first, a lunchtime concert based on moonlight themes may sound like a contradiction, but the seven pieces (including the encore) performed by Laura van der Heijden (cellist) and Jâms Coleman (pianist) formed a perfect midday interlude. They combined technically challenging pieces from the cello repertoire with arrangements of lyrical songs. Each piece evoked the moon as a motif either for longing or for exploration (some pieces offered us a glimpse at both sides of the moon). In fact, the programme was inspired by William T. Horton’s illustration ‘The Path to the Moon’ (from his 1898 collection, A Book of Images) and each piece has its own story that connects listeners (in some cases more tenuously than in others) with the moon.
The duo began with Debussy’s Cello Sonata in D minor. This piece is one of Debussy’s six sonatas for various instruments and was completed in 1915. It follows the structure of a French sonata in that it contains three movements: prologue, serenade, finale. Each movement challenges the cellist in different ways. For a piece that lasts only ten minutes, there is a roster of technically challenging feats to accomplish, including left-hand pizzicato, spiccato and fluatando bowing (where the cellist attempts to sound like a flautist by playing the bow lightly on the string near the fingerboard), false harmonics and portamento. Van der Heijden made this look easy and, more importantly, she made it all sound beguiling. As the musicians stated when speaking to the audience about the concept for their recital, this concert consists of a juxtaposition of lyrical and texturally expressive pieces that showcase the range of the cello.
Van der Heijden was very compelling in the more textured pieces and movements. The second movement of Debussy’s Cello Sonata is one example of her technical skill ability to convey a range of complex, intertwining emotions. Taught by Leonid Gorokhov, whose recording of Rachmaninov’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor is excellent, van der Heijden has the technical foundation to accent her performance in even the most complex passages. I attended the concert with my niece, Rosie, a budding cellist studying at one of Krakow’s music schools. She remarked on how van der Heijden’s familiarity with the music enabled her to give voice to the tensions within the piece to create the image of ‘the moon shining through the clouds’.
Benjamin’s Britten’s ‘Sonetto XXX’ from his Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo was incredible to watch. This may seem like an unusual way to describe listening to a performance, but it really was exciting to watch van der Heijden play as she mapped the vocal range of a tenor with her left hand on the A and D strings. As such, this became a meta-performance of one of Britten’s most well-known songs with its memorable bel canto line played over sostenuto chords on the piano. Van der Heijden won the BBC Young Musician of the Year award in 2012 and in one of her early interviews she explains her intent on making the cello sing. This lyricism could be felt in her natural (but not overly done) rubato. It is also reflected in her performance of three additional songs, arranged for cello.
In fact, in their performance of the three songs that followed Britten’s ‘Sonetto XXX’ – ‘Night’, ‘Will Tomorrow, I Wonder, Be Cloudy or Clear?’, and ‘Die Schönste Nacht’ – both Van der Heijden and Coleman extracted the pieces’ old Hollywood charm. It is unsurprising that Rosie was reminded of ‘When She Loved Me’ written by Randy Newman for Toy Story 2 in 1999. Alone, these pieces would be too sentimental, but framed by the Debussy and Britten cello sonatas, the recital was varied and kept the interest of all present.
‘Night’ (1946) by the American composer Florence Price is based on a poem by Louise C. Wallace. Price’s composition style is evocative of Dvořák and Debussy and this piece was a delightful parallel to the opening of Debussy’s Cello Sonata. Tōru Takemitsu’s music is very interesting, especially the more experimental compositions that he wrote when part of the Kikken Kōbō group. Water Music (1960) is a good example of his combination of influences from traditional Japanese music with the experimentality of musique concrète. Debussy, Edgard Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, and John Cage are among his influences. By contrast, ‘Will Tomorrow, I Wonder, Be Cloudy or Clear?’ from Akira Kurosawa’s film Ran (1985), based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, is a much more sentimental composition than his earlier work. Whilst this piece is too sentimental for my tastes, it worked well in the programme.
Indeed, Takemitsu is not the only composer in the programme to have a filmic connection. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in Brno, which, in 1897, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But, having fled Vienna (where he was professor of music at Vienna State Academy) for Hollywood in 1934, he quickly became known for his compositions for film. He first composed the music for Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which was released in 1935 and later for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The waltz ‘Die Schönste Nacht’ comes from Korngold’s unsuccessful operetta Die Stumme Serenade. It combines 1920s elegance with the Romanticism associated with Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum. During the recital, Coleman commented on this piece saying that both he and van der Heijden both ‘absolutely love’ its ‘fusion of styles’ between Austrian rigor and unrestrained longing. They managed to achieve this balance in their performance.
Composed in 1961, Britten’s Cello Sonata in C major concluded the recital. This piece became the first of five works Britten wrote for Mstislav Rostropovich after hearing him perform on 21 September 1960 at Royal Festival Hall. Van der Heijden and Coleman demonstrated excellent timing in the second movement (marked Scherzo-Pizzicato. Allegretto). They evoked Britten’s sense of humour (Britten remarked to Rostropovich that he may find this movement amusing) as they played with a sense of theatricality befitting of the piece. The pair contrasted this very nicely in their performance of the Elegia which is sonorous and thought-provoking. Again, van der Heijden’s very fine bowing skills were on display in the fifth movement (Molto perpetuo). Coleman also demonstrated his versatility as he shifted from playing in a melodic mode of accompaniment to playing with more texture and agency.
For the encore, the duo returned to Debussy with a polished performance of Beau soir (1891). This has been recorded by several singers, from Barbra Streisand to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and would have been familiar to many members of the audience. Yet, van der Heijden and Coleman injected this piece with renewed vitality as they measured the piece’s much-loved beauty against its modulation away from E major towards F-sharp minor. For any aspiring cellist like Rosie, the album on which this recital was based, Path to the Moon, is charming and, in places, fresh and exciting.
Lucy Jeffery