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Someone at Burnside Distribution Corporation must be monitoring the results of a Google Alert on "mandolin." How else would this company turn up a classical music reviewer to examine a new CD of a mandolin duo? True, almost a year ago I was writing about the Luna Nova Quartet as "an alternative string quartet," whose lead instrument was a mandolin; and earlier this season the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra (through absolutely no influence on my part) prepared a program to feature mandolin soloist Avi Avital. It is also true that next season the Turtle Island String Quartet will return to San Francisco Performances with mandolinist Mike Marshall as guest soloist; but, as Aristotle put it, are these enough swallows to make a spring?
Actually, Mike Marshall may be the swallow in question, because the CD I received was an Adventure Music production of recording sessions he made with German mandolinist Caterina Lichtenberg; and it could not have arrived at a better time. Having begun this week with the superb but agonizingly war-weary new Naxos recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's eighth symphony, I really needed something cheerful; and there is definitely something naturally cheerful about the mandolin, particularly in these Marshall-Lichtenberg sessions. Whether Lichtenberg is playing music by Johann Sebastian Bach for unaccompanied violin while Marshall accompanies her with a mandocello continuo or the two of them are working their way through a Jean-Marie Leclair sonata for two otherwise unaccompanied violins, these are performances that shine an alternative but favorable light on Baroque performance tradition. The same can be said of their approach to folk sources, whether they come from Bulgaria or Latin America; and their interplay in Marshall's original composition, "The Cat, The Mouse and The Chicken," offers the endearing game of figuring out which animal is speaking when.
So, yes, this CD is very much a harbinger of spring, figuratively if not literally (by the timing of its release). It offers a gentle reminder that the mandolin is as worth of serious listening as any other well-played instrument; and these are definitely two superb performers. I can only hope that they can account for themselves in recital as well as they have done on this recording.
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