Sonatas For Violin & Piano, etc.

Between about 2011-16 I drove a car that must have been among the last made with a cassette player installed. I had no cassettes, so if I wanted in-car entertainment, it had to be via the radio. I found BBC Radio 3 to be the least annoying of the readily receivable stations. One afternoon while stuck in traffic on the way home from work I heard a delightful piece for violin and piano that captured my attention: checking the playlist later I learned it was one of Carl Maria von Weber's Violin Sonatas, performed by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov.

A few months later I bought the CD of which that performance was a part. It includes a complete set of six such sonatas that Weber wrote in 1810 and a Piano Quintet dating from the year before. All, then, are youthful works from the composer's early twenties. Roman Hinke's booklet notes (given in French, English and German) tell us that the sonatas were written for a publisher who'd requested short and simple works meant for amateur musicians. Chafing at those constraints, Weber produced pieces which were too original and too challenging for their intended recipient - but he was able to find a more open-minded buyer soon enough.

It's too bad that Weber produced so little chamber music over his short life: beyond the works on this disc and his well-known Clarinet Quintet there's very little else. It's a beguilingly lovely disc - the six sonatas are arranged out-of order: nos. 6, 3, & 4 are followed by the Quartet, and then nos. 2, 5 & 1. No. 6 is, I think, the single most arresting of the pieces, so it makes good sense to hear it first. The playing and recording are excellent throughout. Melnikov plays an early 19th Century Viennese fortepiano, Faust a Stradivarius. They are joined by Boris Faust (viola) and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt (cello) for the Quartet.

Comments

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog