Anyone familiar with the work of cellist Peter Eom, who performed on Wednesday in the RBA, would not have been expecting a collection of Bach and Britten pieces.  They might have been surprised though by the floor layout, which featured six “cello stations”.  Peter’s introduction stated that his recital was titled Primordial because he wanted to suggest rituals, dreams and surrealism and he wanted us to take the recital on whatever terms we, or our subconsciousnesses, chose but to experience it as a single whole played end to end.

In fact it did break down into five sections with three moments for silent reflection (listed in the programme as the three movements of John Cage’s 4’33” (I’ve seen that done before!) and a fourth “break” which was actually a recording of John Cage’s talk At the Middle (which of course came just before the end.  Each section, onaturally, was played at a different “station”.

The choice of cello material was quite varied.  The first section featured dream like, sparse pieces by Ana Sokolovic (Cinque danze per violino solo, No.2) and Kaija Saariaho (Long Live Love) followed by pascal Dusapin’s Imago II which was still quite meditative in mood but featured longer continuous phrases for bowed cello.

György Kurtág’s Árnyak and Ruhelos, run together, started very quietly and very sparsely with a certain amount of extended technique but gradually things got busier, louder, even quite violent with some fairly heavy vocalising.  Péter Eötvös’ Two Poems to Polly took things even further with the poem about, inter alia, temple bells and hope, being chanted over a mix of plucked and bowed strings.

After that, Paul Desenne’s Jaguar Songs sounded almost conventional.  Sure, it’s atonal and involves a certain amount of extended technique but mostly it comes over as the sort of highly virtuosic piece that might have been written, ceteris paribus, in any era.  Nor would I want to suggest that because this piece was overtly virtuosic that the rest of the programme was in any way easy.  It was all very complex stuff played with supreme skill.

Readers with a long internet memory may remember Jean-Paul Sartre’s Cookbook from which I offer this extract; “Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word cake.”  Arguably Peter Eom’s approach to the solo cello recital is comparable.

Photo credits:  The first one is me, the other three are Stelth Ng