We first came across cellist Kate Shortt at an event where she played avant-garde cello as Penny Rimbaud declaimed his poetry to an expectant throng. Years later, on behalf of the Caliban Sounds label, he invited her to explore some common ground with pianist Alcyona Mick, another of his collaborators, and made the suggestion that they duet on some short classical pieces and then expand upon the themes in which ever way the piano/cello form might lead them.
The end result is Convergence & Variations, a lovely melding of the recognised and the unexpected; a meeting of two like minds who gently push one another in directions that they may not have chosen to head separately, using pieces by the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert and Erik Satie as jumping-off points for their collective imagination.
After a brief melancholic introduction to their improvisatory mind which finds the dramatic sweep of the considered cello veering and drifting in the wake of a high wandering piano motif, two of Bach’s cello suites open the formal proceedings. Kate’s approach contains a measure of her attitude as the feel is textured, punkish; a gruff tone that does not stand in awe of the pieces. In comparison, the rather lovely and indulgent piano duets with a cello that responds kindly; while later the piano is more introspective, pondering gently as the cello yearns.The album is impressive in its brevity, squeezing twenty-one pieces into forty-two minutes with them split almost equally between improv and known pieces, so the romantic and controlled Schubert is followed by something a little freer, a little wilder, a nature-infused dance on the keyboard with the cello aching for the sky then padding like a double bass. Marin Marais‘s “La Folia Variations” finds the cello singing and shuddering through a circulating dance; while in the improvs, the piano takes the idea and expands harpsichord-like while the cello reassures, slowing things down and administering cool.
And so it goes; Satie’s delightful Gymnopédies are picked apart and pushed further, made warmer but juddering and vibrating with tension, becoming almost clumsy, an awkward piano passage causing the listener to rethink what they know of Satie. Antonio Vivaldi is the antithesis of Satie, muscular and vibrant and the improv almost shadows the original, with the cello descending into wild territory while the sprinkles of starlit piano against the dark cello sky reverse the roles of the heartbroken echoing Sergei Rachmaninov‘s “Vocalise”. The penultimate improv is the freest and most abstract, playful and intense in equal measures but swiftly traversing those moods. It is the perfect merging of classical and experimental and leads into the final piece, “The Call, On The Theme Of ‘Kol Nidrei’”, an original of Kate’s, mournful yet enlightened in some curious way and proving itself to be the perfect end.Convergence & Variations is an interesting confection, one that introduces two players with unique feels who operate really well as a duo, but approach the chosen material with an insightful and adventurous air, making them their own.
-Mr Olivetti-
