Anja Lechner: Abel, Bach, Hume

The Strad Issue: December 2024

Description: An ECM regular goes solo, to alluring effect

Musicians: Anja Lechner (cello)

Works: Abel: Arpeggio in D minor; Adagio in D minor. Bach: Cello Suites: no.1 in G major BWV1007; no.2 in D minor BWV1008. Hume: A Question; An Answer; Harke, Harke; Hit it in the Middle; Tom and Mistresse Fine; The New Cut; A Pollish Ayre; Touch me Lightly

Catalogue number: ECM NEW SERIES 2806

Anja Lechner’s first solo album looks backwards from Bach and includes accounts of some of her own cello arrangements of viol repertoire. Using a Baroque bow throughout, she reproduces the varied colours and characters of selected ‘Phansies’ from Tobias Hume’s inventive Musicall Humors with striking results. Sample her quasi-improvisatory approach to ‘A Question’, her deft exploitation of col legno (‘Harke, Harke’) and pizzicato (‘Tom and Mistresse Fine’) and her introduction of sul ponticello midway through ‘Touch me Lightly’ (from the 1605 collection The First Part of Ayres). She also performs both works by Abel with the composer’s characteristic ‘discretion, taste and pathetic manner of expressing’ an Adagio (as described by Burney).

Lechner’s readings of the two Bach suites attest to her technical precision, flexibility of tempo and poised, unforced bowing approach, particularly in passages involving multiple stopping. She highlights the implied harmonic progressions of the rhapsodic Preludes and consistently gives the music space to breathe (sometimes overmuch for maximum continuity in BWV1007’s Allemande and Sarabande). She adds a modicum of ornamentation in repeated sections of most of the stylised dance movements and invigorates the spirited courantes and gigues with incisive articulation. The reverberant church recording is fairly close, yet the faint tintinnabulation of a distant bell is still audible at the end of the second repeat of BWV1007’s sprightly first Minuet.

ROBIN STOWELL