Cellist Daniel Müller-Schott

A Vancouver Recital Society presentation. At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Friday, November 27

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote five sonatas for the cello and piano plus several sets of variations, and cellists ever since have been grateful.

The sonatas aren’t the most profound music that Beethoven wrote by any stretch—they suggest things written for a royal patron who happened to play the cello, if rather well. But they are beautiful in their way and they cover all three of his generally accepted periods. Mainly they show that he was well aware of the cello’s noble, eloquent voice.

Playing in a rare partnership for the Vancouver Recital Society, cellist Daniel Müller-Schott and pianist Angela Hewitt, each a well-known soloist, divided Beethoven’s output into two separate programs on November 27 at the Chan Centre and November 29 at Vancouver Playhouse. I heard the former.

It’s a myth that only musicians who’ve played together for decades are privy to the inner sanctum of chamber music’s secrets—of knowing how to pick up a phrase and respond to it. All it takes is an ear, a personal virtuosity, a sensitivity to what’s in the score, and the generosity to sublimate technique and listen to the other instrument.

Each of these musicians is individually splendid—Hewitt for her Johann Sebastian Bach in particular—and together they were a model of the art of producing that “chamberly” synergy.

The Sonata No. 1 in F Major, Op. 5, which Beethoven wrote at the age of 26, is not really a minor work, despite its earliness. Written for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, who was an amateur cellist and gave Beethoven a box of gold coins for his trouble, it shows style and great energy and was played to a turn by the duo, with a closing to the allegro that was daringly slow and conversational.

Beethoven was completely deaf by the time he wrote the two sonatas of Opus 102 in 1815, and the first sonata of the set is the least interesting of the five. Not so for the Sonata No. 3 in A Major, Op. 69, by which time he’d fully liberated the cello from piano dominance.

This is Beethoven through and through, with its hair-raising development section of the first movement and a hard-to-resist scherzo full of off-beat accents. This was gripping playing, Müller-Schott extracting an expressiveness that I haven’t heard from Yo-Yo Ma, and Hewitt absolutely with him on her splendid Fazioli piano.

They threw in the dessert of the Variations in F Major, taken from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.