Don’t all amplifiers do that? Not even close. A bit of extra energy here, a non-linearity there and all of a sudden your sonic picture is growing lumps, bumps and carbuncles – hesitations in the rhythm or phrasing, notes that last to long, get too loud or not loud enough: aberrations your ear and brain spend time and effort on deciphering. That’s the same ear and brain that are designed to reconstruct or recognize the three-dimensional sonic landscape around you.
It’s not hard to find examples, not of what so often goes wrong, but what happens (as with the TMA) when it goes right. Anastasia Kobekina is a recent discovery. Her album Ellipses (Mirare MIR604) captures the young cellist playing 11 miniatures with a total running time of just over 50 minutes. Solo pieces and duets (with piano, clavecin, guitar or percussion) they perfectly suit the energy, vitality and attack in her playing. Yet a track like the Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 is a study in poised restraint, the cello in intimate conversation with the guitar. The TMA effortlessly maintains the relative scale of the two instruments, their placement, the proportions of the soundstage. There’s no missing the fact that the guitar is held horizontally and the larger volume of the cello vertically. The sheer stability of the picture allows you to simply accept the size, position and spatial relationship between the instruments, leaving you free to concentrate instead on their musical interplay, the evocative contrast between the length of the cello’s bowed phrases and the attack of the guitar’s picked lines. The unimpeded clarity of the musical conversation is as subtle as it is beautiful, but what is less immediately obvious is that it’s the timing and placement of the notes, their natural sense of length and decay that’s holding the whole thing together, that give it the natural sense of shape and pattern that makes it so easy to revel in the music and the playing.
Switch up to the final track, Gallardo (written for her by the cellist’s father) and the impulsive dance rhythm and dynamic graduation that propel the music, the chopped action of bow on string and the percussive notes of the tambourine are perfectly mapped and traced by the TMA. The skittering cascades that close out the track have a glorious feeling of controlled abandon. A telling example of the amplifier’s control over time and amplitude, just as its grip of structure and pattern allow it to navigate the angular, deconstructed, avant-garde shapes of Thierry Escaich’s La Folia, anchoring them to the underlying sense of that propulsive pace and rhythm.
Of course, such small-scale forces and simple recordings should be easy meat for a small, straight-line, minimalist amplifier like the TMA. Even so, the results arte impressively musical and engaging, the natural balance and perspective the amplifier brings to the presentation really allowing the music to breathe, a quality that’s obvious on such intimate pieces. But what about larger scale and more complex pieces? Dynamically and structurally, music doesn’t come much more demanding than the Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Ms. Kobekina again, this time with the Berner Symphonieorchester and Kevin John Edusei (Claves Records 50-1901). From the jaunty opening bars, the performance and recording establish the relationship between soloist and orchestra, with the cello clearly setting the pace and prompting the orchestral contributions. The tonality, so reminiscent of the Fifth Symphony, is spot on – even down to the explosive detonations of the bass drum. The TMA keeps everything in its place and perfectly balanced. As the performance crosses into the Second Movement, it conjures the solo part, growing it perfectly from the orchestral string opening, re-establishing the primacy of the solo cello. The Cadenza is a natural highlight, but what really impresses is the way the transition into the final movement is driven by the soloist, right up to the shockingly abrupt close.
