Jan Vogler, appointed principal cello for the Staatskapelle Dresden at age 20 and now pursuing a solo career, appears here in the second chamber-orchestra recording of Schumann’s cello concerto to have appeared in recent months. Playing the work with chamber orchestra rather than full symphonic complement makes good sense, assisting the soloist in a piece that’s littered with registral dilemmas. The solo writing often involves awkward passagework in the perilous upper regions of the instrument, so it’s less of a struggle to be heard against Schumann’s notoriously dense orchestral textures. The listener benefits too, and if the disc has been well engineered the ear registers details among inner supporting voices that often pass undetected. This effect is even more pronounced with Vogler’s Berlin Classics disc than with Mischa Maisky’s recent version with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra on DG. Interplay between second violins and violas, and double bass, clarinet, and bassoon lines all emerge very clearly. Vogler’s dignified restraint, assured technique, and alert sensitivity generate a performance that’s more considered and measured than most, but that’s still keenly alive to the elusive, internalized character of the piece.
He gives an especially pleasing account of the slow movement, in which the orchestra’s principal cello also plays an important part in several duet-like passages. Vogler takes the finale at a moderate tempo, which allows him to hammer through steely staccato passages with great forcefulness at the heel of the bow. It’s sensibly less frenetic than Maisky’s reading, where wild vibrato and emotional out-wringing of every passage (even ones without rhetorical importance like the first movement’s second subject theme) turn his performance into the tournament that Schumann never envisioned. Vogler’s is remininiscent of Luis Claret’s very fine 1989 Harmonia Mundi version, with the English Chamber Orchestra under Edmon Colomer, but Claret’s account often is even more enticing because he plays with greater variety of tone and attack than the sometimes hard-sounding Vogler.
Finally, Schumann’s cello concerto sits awkwardly beside Jörg Widmann’s new work “Dunkle Saiten”–45 minutes of “let’s try to be clever” post-modernist cacophony that’s as bewildering as it is over-long. Vogler makes the best of its fragmentary material and brutal effects; but with a coupling as crazy as this, most collectors will likely conclude that this disc just shot itself in the foot!
