Cellophony / Jessica Zhu, Wigmore Hall, London

Contrary to the now-fashionable purist view of classical music, there is a long and noble tradition of bowdlerising great music, often as a tool for popularisation. That can hardly have been the assumption the eight members of Cellophony made when they started performing together four years ago. Massed cellos are, at least in theory, more a freak show than a serious musical proposition – but that’s another assumption Cellophony have turned on its head. Their contribution to this PLG Young Artists recital proved that a bank of cellos can sound as rich as a string orchestra and as versatile as a pick-up band.

Listening to their resonant tapestry in Schubert’s “Liebesbotschaft” from Schwanengesang, it was easy to forget the song on which it was based. Not all the arrangements worked on this exalted plane. The Prelude to Tristan und Isolde undersold Wagner’s long lines, an impression hardened by the rushed nature of the performance. Their two Preludes from The Well-Tempered Clavier lacked the clarity of line and voicing of the great Bach orchestral transcriptions, and their Wieniawski and Irving Berlin ditties brought to mind what sociologists call the “McDonaldisation” effect – homogenising timbre and texture in a way that makes eight instruments sound no better than two. But Berio’s Korot, an original cello octet, created some wonderful unison effects. Cellophony are imaginative and inspiring: it would have been good to hear more.

As it was, the PLG management saw fit to cram two recitals into one, and it didn’t gel. The cellists had to share the bill with Jessica Zhu, a Chinese-American pianist who failed to summon the bravura her choice of repertoire demanded. If you expose yourself in Liszt’s “Vallée d’Obermann” at the Wigmore, the assumption is that you are a grown-up pianist with a big imagination. Zhu made it sound like a splashy graduation piece. Her Haydn Sonata in E flat had charm and intensity of feeling, and Falla’s Fantasia Baetica played to her percussive sound-palette, but Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli lacked poetic insight.

www.wigmore-hall.org.uk