Luzerner Zeitung 11 Jun 2026 Roman Kühne, Diana Sonja Tobler
The final note rings out. The tension breaks. A thunderous round of applause floods the concert hall. On this Wednesday evening, cellist Anastasia Kobekina and the Festival Strings Lucerne create an atmosphere – indeed, an intensity – that is rarely experienced even at the KKL.
The eternal music of the atheist
Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto is, however, also a remarkable piece. Destruction and suffering defined the composer’s life in 1918. The First World War was hurtling towards its bloody conclusion. Friends of his – including the baritone Charles Mott, who had recently sung the lead role in the song cycle *Fringes of the Fleet* – were falling at the front.
Elgar himself had just recovered from a severe case of tonsillitis. With ‘a black stone the size of a pea inside’, as his wife Alice noted in her diary. She, who always accompanied him, was also seriously ill.
It was in this frame of mind that Edward Elgar composed the Cello Concerto in E minor. His last major work. He was 62 years old. Shortly afterwards, his wife died – and with her, every source of inspiration.
And he, who believes that ‘there is nothing but utter oblivion’, weaves a tapestry of the soul in the Cello Concerto, the likes of which scarcely any composer in 1,500 years of classical music history has managed to create.
The cello sings and spits
A lamenting poem, a blazing pain – as if tailor-made for the soloist Anastasia Kobekina. She comes on stage barefoot, wearing a sort of batik pyjama. Her stage presence is free, her playing is free. The first note: a cry, only to collapse in on itself at once. A sigh that the orchestra carries quietly and painfully to the strings. And then she delivers it: the fire. The composer suffers, and the musician with him. Her cello sings and spits.
The ecstasy, the devotion – it could be too much. Yet with Anastasia Kobekina, everything flows naturally along its dark path of suffering. Time and again, the music strives towards the light. Yet it never quite reaches it.
It is almost magical how the Festival Strings – as always, without a conductor – weave the accompaniment into this free-flowing surge. As an encore, she plays the composition ‘Galliarda’ by her father, Vladimir Kobekin, for cello and tambourine alone.
