Brighton Year-Round 2024

St Nicholas Duo Brikcius 2 Cello Recital

Duo Brikcius

Genre: Live Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Two siblings. Two cellists. Though Frantisek Brikcius and Anna Brikciusova who comprise Duo Brikcius, giving their two-cello recital at St Nicholas, are far more. The accent’s on Czech music and some anniversaries.

The two-cello line-up is exquisitely realised in the St Nicholas sonorities, with its wooden roof and Anglo-Norman space: it’s the perfect echo-chamber, reverberant but not at all swimmy, and no detail gets lost.

By coincidence I also noted it was Bach’s 339^th birthday today, and they added the 170^th anniversary this year of Janacek’s birth and 65^th of Martinu’s death. It’s also the bicentenary of Smetena’s birth, most important landmark of all: but there’s no music Smetena composed that fits this bill.

Prize-winning international cellist Frantisek is also a renowned film-maker working with for instance Sir Tom Stoppard and Vaclav Havel, often featuring work around the Holocaust – and some of its victims, renowned composers. He’s also much in evidence on juries and makes a speciality of solo cello repertoire, from Bach, Reger, Bloch, Britten to contemporary music by Berio, Lutoslawski and many others. Anna’s an acclaimed prize-winning poet (and known to UK poets like myself) and short-story writer, also distinguished as an intnerationally-known cellist.

Mozart Sonata for Two Cellos KV292

They began with a little-known piece –  also arranged for bassoon and cello in B flat – with a simple allegro/andante-allegro/rondo construction. It’s attractive, written around 1777, and with the dominant bassoon line as the melodic one, and the now second cello as more of a continuo. That said, rendered for two cellos even more of the relative equality emerges.

The first allegro’s almost an andante too, but full of glints and details. There’s a beautifully exposed cantabile in the andante, and a fine rondo in the last allegro. Both cellists enjoy a light touch here, different to what they commit to later on.

Irena Kosikova Fantazie IV; Pavane; Bridges for Two Cellos

Irena Kosikova’s a Czech composer born at a guess after 1970: composer, organist and Bach specialist, she comes from the Czech organist line most recently famed for the music of Peter Eben (1929-2007). Three pieces were played interspersed with the other works, but I’m considering them here.

The Fantazie IV for Two Cellos is a relatively restrained work, full of a dense probing world more fully explored later on. I wish there was a language to express the chromatic shifts, the low registers of both cellists, the close-woven sonorities particularly at the lower registers, with occasional high glints.

The two-cello line is indeed full of contrapuntal glints too befitting a Bach scholar but wholly contemporary: and perhaps too a sense of the deep registrations of the organ world hangs hauntingly round all of Kosikova’s works here.

The Pavane for Two Cellos seems far more probing than that title suggests: a real rocking to death on a boat to the Styx perhaps. Again particularly deep sonorities are a hallmark. I\,m reminded of the powerful organ world of Eben, but Kosikova’s world is unique: the contrapuntal elements, the specific creation of a two-cello piece, clearly something Kosikova finds inspiring.

Finally Bridges for Two Cellos involves a tighter and more virtuosic conversation between the two cellos. Higher more exposed melodic lines as well as contrapuntal depth at high and low registrations mark this as different in tone to the preceding. But of all the works here, these are the ones I’d particularly like to hear again.

J.S. Bach 4 Cantates for Two Cellos

There’s 25 duets from the 2013 Cantatas that have ben arranged for two cellos. Here we hear four of them. It’s intriguing to hear these pieces -m often originally taken from a cello line accompanying a human voice (the cello often cite as the musical instruments closest to it) ir other duets – oboe and cello come to mind. I wasn’t able to identify which ones these ere, and the flitted by without me feeling I knew any one of them.

They’re curiously classical and quite light-textured in manner, rather than purely late baroque. More rococo even, like Bach’s son C.P.E. Bach. and the most elusive to describe. The Duo are relaxed, playful and exuding exquisite quiet content here.

Bohuslav Martinu Composition for Two Cellos H.377 (1959)

Martinu is a 20^th century Czech giant, and wrote much for the cello, including two Cello Concertos and two Cello Sonatas. This piece, lasting just a second or so more than a minute was written in March 1959, shortly before Martinu’s death on August 28^th that year. It’s been recorded by Steven Isserlis for instance.

It’s again elusive. A little of the great motor rhythms that fuels much of Martinu’s music barely get underway, and there’s a light, classical feel to the work, rather different to some of the powerful rising motifs and wonderful rhythmic brilliance of the composer’s work. It’s a slight mystery as to why this work was left as it was, as the composer ha time to develop it. Martinu was up against time elsewhere perhaps, completing other works, but it’s a curious, forlorn chip from. a great workshop.

Leos Janacek Presto (1910)

Janacek’s Presto though signalled as written for one cello is given two. From 1910, it’s  mature Janacek and here there’s no doubting the fingerprints of Janacek’s great (and last) phase, which was gathering speed.

What the Duo enjoy here is quite other: the melodic line and quirks are emphasised, and some very edgy tuning expose how radical Janacek was: the Duo revel in how unlovely some of Janacek’s harmonies are, as opposed to the wonderful melodies.

Overall a richly satisfying recital, letting us into worlds and sonorities, ways of listening to some music we knew, and much we didn’t, that I’d love to hear again. Superb.

Published March 21, 2024March 21, 2024 by Simon Jenner