Last week you played at Elbphilharmonie, right? Was this the kind of chamber music project you mentioned?
This was a very special thing because I was able to bring all my projects on stage in one evening. So I brought Jacques, of course, the Schubert Quintet with the exceptional young Esmé Quartet, as well as my wonderful new trio with Asya Fateyeva on saxophone, accordion (Andreas Borregaard) and cello with our version of the Goldberg Variations. It’s lovely because the polyphonic variations come out much better when you have heterogenic instrumentation. Usually, the instrumentation is homophonic and slightly too homogenous. So to have a heterogenous arrangement was interesting because the pairings work really well. The saxophone and the accordion connect well, and the cello and the accordion or cello and saxophone can blend really well too. So there are nice threads in between the instruments.
Is there a recording of this?
Not yet! We are working on it.
My third pillar is playing with orchestra. In this portrait concert at Elbphilharmonie I played with the Deutsche Kammerorchester Berlin, we did an Hommage to Astor Piazzolla. I love to play this kind of repertoire that I am specialised in also with orchestra. I recently recorded the First Cello Concerto by Nikolai Kapustin and am planning to play the wonderful John Williams Cello Concerto. Actually, I was already scheduled to play this, but it got cancelled because of Covid.
There are many more amazing pieces — take the Schnittke Concerto for example — which are on the borderline of 20th Century music and which touch other genres like jazz or world music-inspired symphonic works for cello and orchestra. Rather than playing standard repertoire, which is already fantastically covered by wonderful colleagues, my idea is to perform and record works where I can contribute something new.
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Thank you so much for your answers! Haven’t you just released a new CD with Jacques?
Yes, end of last year, we released a new CD with Beethoven and other revolutionary icons of rock, pop and jazz such as Frank Zappa, Amy Winehouse and Jimi Hendrix. This May, we’re about to release Baroque in Blue, a juxtaposition of baroque and jazz related works.
Website: eckartrunge.com
Runge&Ammon: celloproject.de
