MUSIC REVIEW : Cellist Rivinius Makes Local Debut

German cellist Gustav Rivinius made his local debut on Sunday with a recital in the Doheny Mansion as part of the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series.

In the program’s two big works, the Debussy Sonata and the Sonata in E minor of Brahms, the 25-year-old Gold Medal winner of the 1990 Tchaikovsky Competition proved a formidable technician, one of the few and far-between cellists who finds intonation problems nonexistent.

Rivinius is the very model of a modern cellist in the rhythmic acuity of his playing and the focus of his tone, which retains its beam-like clarity even with generous applications of vibrato.

The cellist negotiated Debussy’s twists and turns with sovereign ease. Whether he and his pianist, younger brother Paul Rivinius, captured more than a minimum of the work’s fantasy is open to question.

This is a “modern” work, to be sure. Which does not mean that it should be presented, as it was on Sunday, entirely from a Stravinskian perspective, all edges and penetrating thrusts. Conspicuously absent was a notion of the work’s softer, subtler dynamics.

In the Brahms sonata one could again take pleasure in the accuracy and rhythmicality of Rivinius’ work. But brother Paul’s fiercely unsentimental, gray-toned pianism proved more wet blanket than enhancement.

This is, after all Romantic --in style and sentiment--music, intended to bend and sway, and to caress the ear.

Messrs. Rivinius and Rivinius succeeded in getting the notes out efficiently, in an interpretation too brittle and episodic to convey more than a suggestion of Brahmsian warmth.

Withal, Gustav Rivinius is too forceful an artist to be dismissed as merely another young mechanical whiz. One would like to hear him again, in music closer to our own--and his own--time.