A young cellist continues the family tradition
The Strad Issue: May 2026
Description: A young cellist continues the family tradition
Musicians: Simon Tetzlaff (cello) Kiveli Doerken (piano)
Works: Kodály: Sonata for Solo Cello. Sibelius: Malinconia; Theme and Variations. Ysaÿe: Sonata for Solo Cello
Catalogue number: HÄNSSLER CLASSIC HC25027
Simon Tetzlaff, scion of an illustrious German musical family, presents his considerable credentials with an ambitious (almost) unaccompanied programme. With broadly majestic tempos, his rendition of Kodály’s Sonata bears comparison with its best predecessors.
Tetzlaff lets just the right amount of Magyar wildness into his consistently cultivated tone, keeping a watchful eye on the music’s rhapsodic structures (an intriguing rhythmic quirk in the first movement notwithstanding).
Jean Sibelius wrote Malinconia in the wake of his daughter’s death from typhus at the age of two; unsurprisingly, it consists of twelve minutes of unrelieved gloom. In close partnership with Kiveli Doerken, Tetzlaff sings his heart out with a welcome understatement that makes the music’s effect all the more powerful.
Sibelius’s Theme and Variations stem from 1887, the year he started composition lessons. Tetzlaff brings out the folksy character of the theme and dispatches with aplomb the increasingly intricate variations, which seem somewhat redolent of Paganini’s 24th Caprice, suggesting that the composer might have improvised them on the violin – his own instrument – before adapting them for his cello-playing brother.
Ysaÿe’s Solo Sonata was written right after the better-known ones for violin. Tetzlaff is alert to the omnipresent Bachian echoes of its rhapsodising prelude, stylised gavotte, recitative and recapitulating finale.
Tetzlaff’s Vuillaume cello has been faithfully captured in a sympathetic acoustic throughout this most attractive calling card of a recital.
CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE
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