Non-Mellow Cello

At the 654th Sunday concert at Hart House, cellist Brian Yoon and pianist Eliza Ching presented a series of cello and piano pieces. 25-year-old Brian is an accomplished cellist who is currently the principal cellist with the Victoria Symphony.

But if the silver-haired set was expecting Yo-Yo Ma's sweet tones and Bach's cello suites, they were in for a surprise. The program was aggressively modern; the oldest piece was Poulenc's Op 143 composed in 1948. They started out with String Theory (2012) full of string effects and strange dissonance with no easy musicality. No wonder as it was the test piece for the 2012 Eckhart-Gramatte Music Composition. Luckily, the follow-up was Poulenc's Sonata with four lyrical movements.

After the intermission, they played Elizabeth Raum's Prayer and Dance of Praise (1997): a modern piece that nevertheless had accessible passages and melodies. Finally, both Vincent Ho's Stigmata (2004) and Gary Kulesha's ... and dark time flowed by her like a river ... (1993) were full of violent feeling and atonal sounds.

Eliza made an engaging accompanist for the manic Brian. The latter reveled in applying a wide variety of techniques: vibrato, glissando, plucked strings, chords, and tinny almost attenuated sounds from his cello. But he also played the warm, enveloping, and dulcet tones that are more typical of this instrument.