Newsday, August 2004

Some musicians win over their audiences with ingratiating ways, dollops of syrupy sweetness and soothing, comely sounds. Cellist Pieter Wispelwey takes a very different approach, challenging his listeners with sometimes homely tone, playing that can be rough-hewn, and musicianship of commanding integrity and power.  

These qualities came to the fore in Wispelwey's concert of Bach's cello suites Nos. 4 and 2, part of the Mostly Mozart Festival's "A Little Night Music" series. Lincoln Center's Kaplan Penthouse was set up as a kind of starchy cabaret, sanitized for your protection. It proved the ideal setting for the cellist's small-scale take on Bach's music.  

Wispelwey's Bach, to be sure, has the modesty of Vermeer's paintings, which can pack whole universes of detail and meaning into less than a square foot of canvas. But where some cellists drape Bach's music in marmoreal grandeur, Wispelwey treated the suites as an invitation to the dance.  

In Wispelwey's hands, the prelude of the Suite No. 4 in E-flat had an improvisatory feel. The twitchiness and angularity of his playing shocked the crowd into silence, leaving one with the welcome sense of being alone with Bach's music but for the ghostly whisper of the cellist's fingers sliding along the strings and the rain-whipped wind off the Hudson. Wispelwey summoned grinding, almost rubbery sounds for the sarabande and a saucy, dance-like motion for the first bourrée, concluding with a lurching, stomping gigue.  

In the opening of the Suite No. 2 in D minor, Wispelwey juxtaposed swashes of unflinchingly black tone with feathery passagework. He played the allemande with feline grace and set the courante in motion with sharply percussive attacks. A stark, melancholy sarabande, tripping minuets and a deliciously cheeky gigue brought the suite and the concert to a tantalizingly swift conclusion.  

After that absorbing hour of Wispelwey unplugged, prime seats in Avery Fisher Hall for his Friday concert with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra under Louis Langrée felt like exile. Still, the cellist offered a compelling reading of Robert Schumann's Cello Concerto in A minor, puncturing the yearning, tortured phrases of the opening movement with impish licks. His playing was heart-stoppingly beautiful in the concerto's brief slow movement, graced with satiny tone and a masterful use of rubato (rhythmic give-and-take). As in his Bach recital, there was a roughness and waywardness to Wispelwey's performance of Schumann's wild final movement that testified not to a lack of virtuosity but to bold and uncompromising musicianship.  

Friday's concert also included Haydn's Symphony No. 44, thicker in sound than one might wish, and a splendid reading of Mozart's Symphony No. 40. Langrée and the Festival Orchestra served up a lithe, storm-tossed performance, with gorgeous wind playing and a coltish, electric energy throughout.  

PIETER WISPELWEY, CELLO. Cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach and cello concerto by Robert Schumann. Attended Wednesday and Friday at Lincoln Center. The Mostly Mozart Festival continues through Aug. 28. For information, visit www.lincolncenter.org or call 212-875-5456.