Othmar Schoeck wrote very few pieces for orchestra, and even fewer for full orchestra. This seems to be a pattern with 20th-century Swiss composers, perhaps due to the ready availability of chamber orchestras and smaller groupings, in addition to the standard-sized ensembles in Zurich and Geneva. Or maybe it’s a leftover Calvinist inhibition. Whatever the ultimate reason, Schoeck is best known as a song composer, and his Cello Concerto is scored for solo plus strings. Happily, the limited forces result in music that lacks neither color nor variety.
The work’s four movements play for a bit more than half an hour and are well contrasted, while the composer’s expertise in writing vocal music assures a quantity of lyrical and attractive melodic ideas. Christian Poltéra plays it very well, with aptly singing tone and plenty of rhythmic heft. There are a couple of places in the long first two movements (taking up two-thirds of the whole) where Schoeck, and not the players, lets the tension sag a bit, but the problem isn’t too serious. Conductor Tuomas Ollila and the orchestra sound perfectly comfortable in music that hardly could have been familiar to them.
Schoek died in 1957 before he completed his Cello Sonata, leaving it a three-movement torso that ends, rather touchingly actually, with a somewhat slender Andantino. Still, the piece clearly lacks a satisfying conclusion, and since these two works comprise the composer’s entire output for cello, Poltéra and his accompanist Julius Drake include six song transcriptions tastefully arranged for cello and piano. I’m not sure exactly how many people will want the complete Schoeck cello music–it is, to put it kindly, a niche–but it’s one that this very well recorded disc fills admirably. [7/9/2007]
