Word: scordatura
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...Rossini opera, and spun a half-dozen or so flavors, all to be played on a single string. Shaham's technique is evidently as facile with one string as it is with four, resulting in remarkably few signs of strain throughout the entire piece. He eschews the traditional scordatura (tuning the G string up to a B-flat, in this case), and refreshingly emphasizes a darker tonality than usually encountered with this piece...
...full of rich and varied strong sonorities, gets a passionate reading from Phillips, who has a flourishing chamber-music career, and Grossman, a Chicago Symphony cellist. Even better is the brooding Sonata (1915), which employs just about every string-writing trick there is, including left-hand pizzicato and scordatura (nonstandard tuning). As close to technical impossibility as a piece can be and still remain playable, the Sonata is a 20th century masterpiece that deserves to be known by all music lovers, not just cellists. Grossman's performance, while not as pyrotechnical as, say, Janos Starker's, captures all the work...
...CONTINUO (2 LPs; Cambridge). Although the Baroque revival has dredged up a good deal of dross, it has also led to the discovery of some golden nuggets. Sonya Monosoff plays these with rich tone and temperament and gets colors seldom heard today, for Biber liked to use scordatura, an unorthodox tuning of the strings...
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