The cello duets of Friedrich August Kummer, a much longer-lived contemporary of Schubert, plump up the unused-music files of teachers and students everywhere. Just about every cellist owns a copy of at least a few of the duets, mostly as a subject for study, yet hardly anyone gets around to studying them. I mentioned Kummer to my cello teacher not long ago, and he said, “Oh, yeah. I haven’t thought about Kummer in years. We should work on that.” After a one-week search of his studio, he turned up only one of the duet’s cello parts, realizing that some student had probably made off with the other part a couple of decades ago. He’d never noticed.

Indeed, many avid cellists regard Kummer’s duets as boring, or even beneath contempt—but that perception might change thanks to a new recording of the cello duets by Phoebe Carrai and Tanya Tomkins (Avie Records AV 2060). It is the only Kummer CD available.

Carrai and Tomkins transform these underappreciated works into something quite beguiling.

But even Carrai hadn’t given Kummer’s duets much serious thought until recently. “When I was a kid they sat on my music stand, but I didn’t think much of them at all,” she admits.

Kummer’s work never has been much of a hot property; the duets, in particular, are famous as study pieces rather than concert repertoire, but they’re study pieces that don’t get closely studied very often. Now, more than a century after his death, it looks like that’s been a big mistake.

Classical Serenity
Kummer lived from 1797 to 1879. Born into a German musical family, he studied both cello and oboe, and as a teenager followed in his father’s footsteps as an oboist in the Dresden court orchestra. Only later did he switch to cello professionally—he was moved into the cello section by none other than composer-conductor Carl Maria von Weber—becoming the orchestra’s principal cellist by 1852. According to the New Grove, “He was praised for his consistent strength and beauty of tone in every playing position. His ‘truly classical serenity’ provided a reliable support in ensemble playing.”

Kummer spent most of his life close to home, venturing off on only a few concert tours of Italy, Germany, and Austria. He was certainly noticed and respected abroad, but for the most part Kummer was regarded as a first-rate local talent who taught assiduously and composed virtuoso pieces for his own use, mainly variations and fantasies for cello and orchestra on now-forgotten popular tunes and opera arias. He also produced a great deal of chamber music for amateurs, and cello studies for elementary through advanced levels.

That’s where the duets come in—a bounty of them.

Carrai and Tomkins have recorded five of them, plus the slow movement from a sixth. All the duets on the CD fall into three movements in the usual fast-slow-fast pattern. Kummer’s Opus 156 borrows melodies from Handel, including the Water Music. Opus 22 duets owe much to Mendelssohn, Weber, and Schumann, while the Opus 103 duets seem to have grander ambitions; they’re a bit more challenging technically, and involve a quotation from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a hymn in four-part harmony, and a showy bolero written long before Ravel produced his, or was even born.

Carrai and Tomkins rediscovered the Kummer duets when they were looking for pieces to play in the hospital room of their friend Aenor Sawyer, a pediatric orthopedist who had just undergone cancer surgery.

“Phoebe had the idea to play something in her hospital room, and I just grabbed the nearest music for two cellos in my music studio,” Tomkins recalls. “I didn’t remember what these Kummer pieces sounded like, but that’s what Aenor really responded to.”

She responded so well, in fact, that Sawyer was inspired to persuade Carrai and Tomkins to undertake a project called “Cellos for Chelsea,” named after one of Sawyer’s young patients. Proceeds from concerts and the Kummer CD benefit organizations serving children with cancer.

For the disc, Carrai and Tomkins sifted through many Kummer scores looking for the most attractive duets. Says Carrai, “Some opus numbers are jewels, but others are like a book of Baroque sonatas in which only one thing out of six is really great.”