— La Jolla Music Society’s “Discovery” series for emerging talent began in 1991 under executive director Neale Perl and musical director Heiichiro Ohyama as the Young Artists of Excellence Series. In the decades since, the series’ talent-predicting accuracy has been confirmed by the careers of major talents like violinists Augustin Hadelich and Ray Chen, pianists Daniil Trifonov and Seong-Jin Cho, and guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas. When, weeks ago, originally scheduled “Discovery” artists Philipp Schupelius (cello) and Julius Asal(piano) from Germany couldn’t secure visas, the society looked north to Los Angeles’ Colburn School for a similarly instrumented duo.
Cellist Benett Tsai and pianist Rodolfo Leone’s adventurous and compelling recital Dec. 15 at San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center again affirmed the society’s ear for talent. Although Tsai is now an undergraduate mentee of cellist Clive Greensmith (ex-Tokyo String Quartet and the Royal Philharmonic) at the Colburn School, his roots are thoroughly Australian. Born and raised by musical parents in Sydney, he moved to Los Angeles in 2020. His third prize at the 2022 Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann, where he was this near-top-tier competition’s youngest competitor, marked him as a talent to watch.
The Italian-born Leone won first-prize win at the International Beethoven Piano Competition Vienna in 2017 — Mitsuko Uchida won in 1969 — and a second-prize win at the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition (past winners include Martha Argerich, Alfred Brendel, and Garrick Ohlsson). He’s also recorded the piano works by Muzio Clementi, considered by some to be the father of the pianoforte, on Naxos.
A mere 22 years old, Tsai plays like an old soul. He admits to wanting as a kid to channel Herbert von Karajan’s “intensity and focus,” and both were obvious in an enterprising program featuring only two musical mainstays. Tsai, playing a 1719 Giuseppe Guarneri “filius Andreae” cello, commanded the stage with a sure, golden tone, nimble fingerwork, tasteful vibrato, and a magnificent bass growl.
His six-piece program nicely balanced emotional registers and historical and geographic range, from the classicism of Haydn and Beethoven and the late-Romanticism/early modernism of Samuel Barber, Ernest Bloch, and Nadia Boulanger to the modernism of Dmitri Shostakovich. In characterizing his program for me, Tsai claimed no deeper agenda than to “illuminate the individuality of each composer” and to “explore how the instrument [cello] can convey each of their distinct ideas, emotions, and personalities.” In that, Tsai and Leone succeeded beyond doubt.
The duo opened with Gregor Piatigorsky’s 1944 arrangement for cello and piano of three movements drawn from three Joseph Haydn trios for baryton (picture a viola da gamba with extra pluckable strings), viola and cello and titled Divertimento for Cello and Piano. Despite this music’s 18th-century roots, Tsai — reflecting the 1920s Pierre Ruyssen arrangement Piatigorsky worked from — gave it an elegant, 19th-century legato. In the second-movement Menuet, Tsai and Leone flashed the synchronicity that marked their entire partnership.
To label Ernest Bloch a “Jewish composer” is like calling Louis Armstrong a “Black musician”: Its truth distracts from the quality and range the identity label brushes aside. Though best known now for works with explicit Jewish themes — Schelomo, Baal Shem, and this program’s From Jewish Life — the vast majority of Bloch’s output was not labeled at all (including in 1926-27, America, an Epic Rhapsody). But Bloch believed even his explicitly Jewish compositions were “more cosmic and universal than Jewish” (as he put it in reference to his Avodat Ha-kodesh, based on the Sabbath morning liturgy).
The point is worth making because Tsai’s high school, Sydney Grammar School, is only 18 miles from Bondi Beach, where 15 hours before the start of Sunday’s concert, 15 Australian Jews were massacred at a Hanukkah celebration. That fact seemed to weigh in the special emotional power Tsai and Leone gave to Bloch’s 1924 From Jewish Life (no rarity on cello recital programs and announced on Tsai’s concert schedule months ago). Playing with an impossibly dark tone, “cries of the soul” (Tsai’s words) that ached and soared, and weeping cadence, the cellist transformed the “Prayer” and “Supplication” movements into a spellbinding lament and gesture of solace.
An admirer of Bloch’s music, Samuel Barber composed his cello sonata (Op. 6) eight years after From Jewish Life and found for it a crucial advocate in cellist Zara Nelsova, to whom Bloch dedicated all three of his cello suites. However different, both works share an intense lyricism, and Tsai and Leone fully explored the Romantic/post-Romantic influences (from Brahms and Sibelius to Elgar and Debussy) that have been detected in the work — Leone more often expressing the piece’s modern temperament and Tsai its lyrical side. Barber himself always saw the work as deeper or more complex than it seemed: “Strange how many hearings it takes for people to really understand it even when they are favorably disposed.” While showing how the piece straddles both its times and its roots, Tsai and Leone deftly captured those hidden depths — for example, its adventurous rhythmic and harmonic structure (at least in the finale).
With his intent to show how many personalities the cello can communicate, Tsai programmed Boulanger’s skillful Three Pieces for Cello and Piano (1914) because its “layered textures” contrasts so well with the “lightness” of Haydn’s Divertimento, Bloch’s “deeply personal homage,” and Beethoven’s “exploration of love” in “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen.” If the superbly played Boulanger and Beethoven did nothing more than reset palettes for Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D minor (1934), they justified themselves well. The Bloch piece may have been the recital’s emotional heart and highlight, but Shostakovich’s masterpiece, composed only two years after Barber’s sonata but galaxies away in personal perspective, was its compositional peak.
Although this sonata has been described as joyous, neo-classical, romantic, and conservative, Tsai and Leone play these non-Shostakovichian qualities as mere foils the composer — only a year away from his brilliant Fourth Symphony — needed to springboard into what is, especially in the Largo and two Allegro movements, already echt Shostakovich: bleak, sardonic, alert to threats all around.
Despite hearing a replacement act on a sunny San Diego afternoon, the packed, edge-of-their-seat Conrad crowd greeted the duo with hoots of standing applause until they returned for an encore, a beautifully lofted “Beau soir” (1891) by Claude Debussy.