Auerbach's Sonata was intense stuff. The work began with a dramatically violent piano flourish that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the work. After the false optimism of Prokofiev's Cello Sonata, which opened the program, Auerbach's manic hyper-Romanticism washed away any trace of sunshine, drowning the listeners in a tragic flood of despair. Auerbach's musical language is not, on the surface, adventurous. Although she moved back and forth from highly chromatic, even atonal, passages into unquestionable minor key moodiness, one never lost the sense of melody and accompaniment. Where she does explore new territory is in her forms, which attempt to reconcile contrasting elements and moods, but don't quite completely convince.

I thought of Schnittke as an obvious influence here, but he had the ability to combine tonality and atonality, musical styles, to conjure up the wildest juxtapositions, and yet make them work somehow. Auerbach's success in this was more hit-and miss.

Another likeness I heard was Samuel Barber, the later Barber who wrote highly chromatic, stormy works like the Piano Concerto. Auerbach lacks Barber's craft (many don't associate his music with rigor, but behind the emotion and drama was a very meticulous composer), but there was an admirable lyricism in the Sonata, undisciplined as it seemed. Auerbach's music struck me as the sort of music Lowell Liebermann and Richard Danielpour shoot for, but Auerbach gets closer to the target, even if she hasn't found a way to hit the bull's-eye yet.

The first movement was kind of a through-composed rondo, a rondo in that one theme/idea returned again and again, through-composed in that the intervening material was either new or consisted of transformations or developments of earlier heard ideas. In her preceding comments, Wu Han expressed wonderment at the idea of a "waltz in 5/4" (the recurrent thematic material), but hel-lo-o? The second movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony?

The second movement of Auerbach�s Sonata opened with an impassioned cello solo erupting over low, slow ominous chords in the piano. I found this dramatic, stirring music, but it scared the hell out of a 6-year-old sitting a few rows ahead of me, pouting, whining, and holding their hands over their ears (thanks Mom, for removing the child). Over a repeated piano bass line and slowly marching chords, the cello poured out a tortured melodic line, finally concluding with the cello playing a melody, much more slowly, entirely in artificial harmonics.

The third movement featured frantic, devilish streams of sixteenth notes with queasily shifting meters or subdivisions. The last movement opened with an unmistakable cry as the cello's melody was articulated with quarter-tone trills, eventually taking Finckel into the stratosphere. A strange pizzicato lullaby (the 5/4 motif from the first movement?) was accompanied by clashing sweet chords in the piano. The work ended on a disquieting note, as the music fell apart into soft, quiet
dissonances.

As Finckel did with the rest of the program, he played this work from memory. Both he and Wu Han gave Auerbach their all, and the Sonata was well-received by the audience. I couldn't help but think of another young poetess who trafficked in torture, Sylvia Plath. If Plath could also write music, would it sound like Auerbach? I enjoy the imagery in Plath's poetry, but find the overall histrionics off-putting, and I had a similar experience listening to Auerbach. However, for fans of unfiltered emotional rawness, Auerbach may be Lady Lazarus, a musical resurrection of Plath, turning and burning, melting to a shriek.