When the La Jolla Music Society’s previously scheduled German performers Philipp Schupelius and Julius Asal had to cancel their Sunday concert at The Conrad because of visa problems, friends up the coast at Los Angeles’ Colburn School came to the rescue. Rodolfo Leone, a member of Colburn’s piano and chamber music faculty, and cellist Benett Tsai, a Colburn graduate student studying with Clive Greensmith, provided a compelling program in their stead.
This duo’s program featured a judicious collection of works from the early decades of the last century, anchored by Haydn and Beethoven, and the combination of these musicians’ impressive technical prowess and interpretive depth served every musical style splendidly. While this concert marked Tsai’s local debut, Leone performed a Franz Liszt Piano Concerto with the San Diego Symphony in 2019 under guest conductor Michael Francis.
Haydn’s Divertimento for Cello and Piano, arranged by Gregor Piatigorsky, opened the program, and the composer’s graceful themes gave the audience the opportunity to appreciate Tsai’s suave, ingratiating timbre and the elegance of his phrasing, whether he was probing the ethereal calm of the first movement “Adagio” or dispensing the bravura figurations of the “Allegro di molto” finale.
Samuel Barber was still a student at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute when he completed his Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, Op. 6, an episodic, highly dramatic work that is emancipated from the structural constraints of the traditional sonata allegro form. Barber’s gift for writing gorgeous melodies is widely recognized, whether one references the transcendent themes of his Adagio for Strings or the haunting themes of his art song “Sure on the Shining Night,” and his Cello Sonata gives abundant rhapsodic opportunity to the cello—especially in its dark lower register—which Tsai delivered with ardent urgency. Although he is but 22, his playing communicates surprising emotional depth and perception.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sonata in D Minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 40, appeared in 1934, a mere two years after Barber’s Cello Sonata, but the Russian composer followed the opposite path from Barber. This D Minor Sonata is a neoclassical gem in which the composer refreshes the textbook sonata allegro form with a rich harmonic palette and a wry sense of humor. Three of his movements are marked “Allegro,” which provided both Leone and Tsai with an abundance of assertive, spiky themes and clever canonic forays to sport their ample muscular technical prowess.
If the spotlight tended to favor the cellist in this concert, Leone came into his own with his elegant and deftly shaped thematic elaborations in Beethoven’s Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” for Pianoforte and Cello.
I have always appreciated Ernest Bloch’s works from what he called his Jewish cycle, and I wish orchestras would program more frequently his magnificent Cello Concerto Schelomo. But hearing Tsai and Leone play his From Jewish Life, a shorter chamber work from that cycle, with such conviction will have to hold me over until the next Schelomo comes around.
This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society on Sunday, December 14, 2025, at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center.