This disc is one of eleven recordings made by Claudio Ronco and Emanuela Vozza through which they showcase the music of virtuosic cellist-composers from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. An overlooked repertory and – performed by a cello duo rather than a solo cellist with keyboard accompaniment – a neglected mode of performance, this series frequently includes works new to disc. The four sonatas performed here, from Jean-Louis Duport's Op. 4, have not previously been recorded, whilst the two earlier duos are presented on period instruments for the first time.
Duport is perhaps the most familiar of the musicians surveyed by Ronco and Vozza. He is famous to almost all cellists as the author of Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle, et sur la conduite de l'archet (Paris: Imbault, 1806), from which twenty-one studies remain firmly within the pedagogical repertory of the instrument to this day, albeit without their accompaniment for a second cello. Duport was almost certainly the cellist with whom Beethoven performed his Op. 5 sonatas for King Frederick William II of Prussia, and, just occasionally, one feels the presence of the German composer in Duport's later sonatas. These sonatas are, however, clearly those of the cellist-composer, a virtuosic framework and calling card for their author. As such, they place significant interpretative demands on the modern performer. Claudio Ronco, like the cellists he is celebrating in this series, is also an underappreciated cellist-composer, at least in British historical-performance circles. It was Ronco who was the first in recent years to extemporize the accompaniment of early eighteenth-century recitative at the cello (extracts of which can be heard on his website), and whilst I may have some uncertainty about the historicity of the notes performed, there is no doubt that the spirit of his playing embodies the ‘ingenious accompaniment’ of ‘lively fire’ and ‘marvelous tricks’ reported of Corelli's cellist, Giovanni Perroni, by Francesco Ruggero in 1711 (Ursula Kirkendale, Antonio Caldara: Life and Venetian-Roman Oratorios, trans. Warren Kirkendale (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 79).
It is this ingenious musicianship that elevates Ronco and Vozza's disc. There is an inventiveness and fluidity in their interpretation which draws the ear to the graceful, if underdeveloped, melodic material that in turn charms and excites the listener. Be that as it may, this probably remains a disc for dipping in and out of rather than listening to in its entirety. Ronco and Vozza's approach to how they realize this music also allows us to ask some questions regarding late eighteenth-century cellistic practices. Some of these considerations are discussed explicitly in Ronco's accompanying liner notes, whilst other questions arise from a close listening to the recording alongside the traces of Ronco and Vozza's creative processes preserved on their YouTube channel and by examining Duport's own writing and notation.
In addition to performing, researching and writing, Ronco has also engineered and produced the recording. In his notes he describes his choices of acoustics and microphone positioning, commenting that ‘I wanted to get as much as possible the perception of the sound that came to us while we played in that church [Sainte-Marie, Montferrer, France], thereby inviting the listener to share our particular acoustic experience . . . discovering many of the peculiar characteristics of our antique cellos carefully restored to 18th[-]century technical conditions’ (15). In some recent recordings of period instruments it seems as though engineers distrust the musicians and their instruments, in that they introduce an illusionary space through distance and reverberation rather than allowing an intimate engagement with the musicians. Ronco's production, however, achieves his written goals.
More than any other recording I have heard, I can feel myself at the cello when I listen to Ronco and Vozza. Ronco attributes this effect to the ‘great harmonic richness made possible by the synergistic play between the thick and powerful gut strings, manufactured according to the ancient Italian techniques, and the action of the soundboard subjected to a minimum pressure of the bridge’ (15). The strings used in this recording are clearly important to the musicians. Their heartfelt acknowledgement – ‘We thank . . . for the precious supply of gut strings, the master string maker Mimmo Peruffo of Vicenza’ (23) – rings true. I also use Peruffo's strings, playing on them alongside those of Real Guts. Even if Ronco's liner notes sometimes have a feeling reminiscent of recordings from the earliest days of period instruments – when an orchestra imbued its performance with historical authority by detailing on which instruments the musicians played – changes in stringing have undoubtedly had one of the most significant effects on the timbre and declamatory style of period instruments in the last twenty years.
Strings are, however, only one part of a complex network formed between a player and the components of their instruments. Christopher Palameta has introduced, in his discussion of the nineteenth-century oboe, a tripartite system of breath, reed and instrument, and the difficulty of discussing any of these in isolation (‘Berlioz's Lost Oboe?: Exploring the Forgotten Last Generation of the Simple-System Oboe in France’ (PhD dissertation, Royal Academy of Music, 2022)). A similar mechanism has yet to be explicitly described for string instruments; when a player first discovers a more ‘historical’ stringing, or a different bow hold, apparent discoveries or challenges are announced as being a particular quality of the individual component. In Ronco and Vozza's recording, more striking to my ears than the ‘harmonic richness’ of the strings is the relationship between the ‘thick and powerful gut strings’ and the bow. It is the resulting articulations that are always present in their recorded sound and are at the heart of their interpretation. This is the technique through which they both communicate structure in, and embellish, Duport's music.
The relationship with the bow was also important to Duport. He closes his Essai with a section on the form of the bow: ‘I have been so often questioned on the subject of this article, that I am inclined to think it may be more interesting than I have hitherto supposed . . . I think, then, that either a heavy or a light bow is equally good, as this altogether depends on the habit which has been contracted by the player . . . There is no one who has succeeded better in the manufacture of bows, than Mr TOURTE Junr’ (Jean-Louis Duport, Essay on Fingering the Violoncello, and on the Conduct of the Bow, trans. John Bishop ([London:] Cocks, c1852, 174–175). The variety of styles of bow at the turn of the nineteenth century, not to mention their playing characteristics, is astonishing. The 2011 sale of the Huttenbach Collection gave me the opportunity to spend a day with around a dozen cello bows made between 1795 and 1830. Each of these demanded a different style of playing. Some favoured a legato, others would spring at the balance point, still more were suited to a détaché in the upper half of the bow. Ronco and Vozza do not provide details of their bows in their liner notes, although we know from Urania's website that their cellos are eighteenth-century Italian and French instruments. It may therefore be challenging for the curious cellist to use these recordings as an indication of late eighteenth-century style and technique. Ronco often favours an off-the-string stroke, possibly reminiscent of what Duport describes in his Essai as ‘un peu sauté’ (Duport, Essay, 170). This is a very similar stroke to that which Ronco also favours in his earlier recordings of Handel cantatas.
All of this raises questions as to how much of what listeners hear is Ronco, how much is Duport and how much is the bow and strings. Although this bow stroke does create a characteristic affect throughout the recording, it is perhaps not the most striking feature; rather, this is the substantial freedom with which Ronco and Vozza approach the notated slurring and détaché (some of their alterations can also be seen in their YouTube videos). Whilst Duport can only offer one reading through his printed score, his Essai demands that ‘all these varieties of bowing . . . must be studied . . . and I venture to say, that these accents of the bow in passages are merely a matter of fashion, and subject to its changes . . . All this depends on the fancy of the player’ (Duport, trans. Bishop, Essay, 166). As with Ronco's recitative embellishments, Ronco and Vozza's performance of Duport embodies the spirit of the music. With this in mind, the question of how plausible a recreation of historical practices this recording represents can safely be rendered a secondary concern. Such an ethos carries through to other musical and historical considerations that arise throughout the disc; for example, Vozza's delicate, occasional realization of the continuo cello part is so idiomatic as to be indistinguishable from when Duport notates double stops in the accompanying line.
Ronco writes that Jean-Louis Duport did not ‘dedicate his writing to anything other than his virtuosity . . . [which] had to be matched with by equally lively and poetic lyricism’ (14). It is these qualities, apparent in Ronco and Vozza's musicianship, which – amplified by the immediate presence afforded by the engineering – create a premiere recording of this repertory that rewards repeated listening.
