A Fearless, Bristling, Undaunted Solo Album by Cellist Hannah Collins

by delarue

Hannah Collins is the cellist on the wittily scathing DWB (Driving While Black) soundtrack album. Her new solo record Resonance Lines – streaming at Bandcamp – is a treat for fans of low-register sonics, and high-voltage 20th and 21st century works. She doesn’t mess around: her extended technique will give you chills. There’s an iconic suite as well as a very popular, considerably shorter current-day work. Collins’ loosely interconnecting theme celebrates close collaborations between non-cellist composers and the artists they wrote for.

The famous work here is Britten’s Suite No. 1 for Cello Solo. It’s arguably the composer’s best piece, With a spacious yet incisive attack, Collins digs in and lets the overtones bristle through a fearlessly macabre homage to Bach’s Cello Suites, from sudden, shivery sunbursts, to austere drafts filtering under the door, to a pizzicato horror film. Why didn’t Britten ever write anything as chilling or intense as this ever again? We’ll never know. Mstislav Rostropovich’s premiere interpretation is the model for others brave enough to tackle it, but this is equally memorable.

The popular contemporary classical piece here is Caroline Shaw‘s In Manus Tuas. Again, Collins’ brilliance is her semi-savage attack of the composer’s signature, circling riffage. It’s easy to play this as a rapt homage to a beloved sonic space. Collins seems to want to sneak the keg in and then light a bonfire…before the group meditation, anyway.

She opens the album with a briskly crescendoing take of one of the earliest known works for the cello, 17th century Italian composer Giuseppe Colombi’s Chiacona. Kaija Saariaho’s Dreaming Chaconne, a deviously and dauntingly shivery take on the same theme, is next: Collins is undaunted. And she’s undeterred through the sometimes ghostly, sometimes monstrous flurries and slides of Saariaho’s Sept Papillons.

She closes the record with the world premiere of Thomas Kotcheff’s Cadenza (with or without Haydn), a playful and increasingly wild, electrifying, shreddy new work written as a coda for the Haydn Cello Concerto in C major, It’s an apt way to close an album that invites repeated listening.