February 6, 2012.  Bell and Denk play French Violin Sonatas.  The brilliant American violinist Joshua Bell and his good friend and recital partner pianist Jeremy Denk issued a CD with three sonatas for violin and piano for Sony Classical, called French Impressions.  It’s their first album together, and after listening to it, one hopes it won’t be their last.

The three violin sonatas are by Saint-Saëns, Franck and Ravel.  The first two were written at the height of the Belle Époque, Saint-Saëns’ in 1885 and Franck’s just one year later, in 1886.  Ravel wrote his violin sonata late in his life, in 1927, and it belongs to a very different age.

Violin Sonata No. 1 in d minor by Camille Saint-Saëns, very French and very elegant, is essentially salon music.   Bell and Denk play it with great style.  The 3^rd movement, Allegretto Moderato, is especially attractive.  The dynamics are lively and Bell’s sound is beautiful.  You can listen to it here. 

César Franck, born in 1822 in what is now Belgium, spent his adult life in Paris.  He was an organist at Saint Clotilde in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for more than 30 years, a professor at the Paris Conservatory, and, as required for that position, became a French national.  Franck wrote the Violin Sonata in A Major when he was 63; it was a wedding present for Eugène Ysaÿe.  Ysaÿe became a great proponent of the sonata and played it regularly throughout his life, contributing to the public recognition of Franck as a major composer.  Joshua Bell has a very special connection to this piece: his teacher, Josef Gingold, was a pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe.  Maybe this connection to Franck affected the way Bell and Denk play the famous first movement of the Sonata: it’s slower, statelier than many well-known interpretations (Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein play it in less than five and a half minutes.  Bell and Denk take more than six).  But who knows - his approach might be closer to what Franck intended: he originally wrote it as a slow movement: it was Ysaÿe who wanted a quicker tempo and convinced Franck to mark it Allegretto.  Listen to it here.

It’s interesting that both sonatas figure prominently as possible prototypes of the violin sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  In the novel Swann is haunted by the “little phrase” from the sonata, which he associates with his obsessive love for Odette.  Of course we’ll never know for sure, but Proust scholars suspect that it could be the opening chords of Franck’s sonata, the beginning of the Adagio in Saint-Saëns’s sonata, or Faure’s Ballade in F-sharp Major op. 19.

January 30, 2012.  Franz Schubert.  Last week we celebrated Mozart’s anniversary and this week it’s Franz Schubert’s turn: he was born on January 31, 1797.  Mozart and Schubert had very few things in common, except that both were musical geniuses and both died tragically early, Mozart at the age of 35, and Schubert even earlier, at age 31.  Mozart was a child prodigy; he became famous at the age of seven, was employed by royalty and accepted in the finest salons of Europe.  Schubert, on the other hand, was not very popular during his lifetime (very little of his symphonic music was performed until it was rediscovered by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and other Romantic composers), he lived his whole life in Vienna and never visited another country, never married, and till the last three years of his life earned money mostly by teaching.  What they do have in common is one person who played a significant role in both of their lives - Antonio Salieri.  Mozart’s rival and nemesis at the court of Emperor Joseph II, Salieri became Schubert’s benefactor: when Schubert was seven, Salieri noticed his vocal talents and helped him to join Stadtkonvikt (Imperial seminary) on a choir scholarship.  Salieri later gave Schubert private lessons in composition.

But of course the real difference between the two is in their music.  Mozart’s was the pinnacle of classical Viennese style.  Schubert, while deeply affected by it (he was influenced by both Mozart and Beethoven) evolved in a different direction, which we now call Romanticism.  His song cycles, such as Winterreise, late piano sonatas (D. 958, 959 and 960), string quartets and symphonies, not just paved the way for Schumann, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and other Romantics – they ultimately represent some of the greatest achievements in all of 19^th century music.

Since our library has a large number of Schubert’s works, we’ll present some of the latest uploads, as we did last week.  Here is String Quartet No. 13 in a minor, D. 804, the so-called Rosamunde quartet (its second movement is based on the theme Schubert used in his incidental music to the play "Rosamunde").  It’s performed by the violinists Alexi Kenney and Kobi Malkin, Molly Carr, Viola and Jonathan Dormand , cello.  The pianist Yael Weiss  plays "Wanderer" Fantasy in C major, D. 760 (here).  The violinist Diana Cohen plays the early Sonatina No. 3 for Violin and Piano in g minor, D. 408.  Ron Regev is on the piano (here).  Finally, one of Schubert’s last works, String Quintet in C Major, D. 956 (it was written two months before his death).  Playing here are violinists Wonhyee Bae and Je Hye Le, Yoonji Kang, viola, Narek Hakhnazaryan and the great Laurence Lesser, cellos.

January 23, 2012.  Mozart.  Friday the 27^th of January marks the 256th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  This sublime piece of music, the terzettino, or short trio Soave sia il vento (“May the wind be gentle”) from the 1^st act of his opera Così fan tutte, was most likely written at the end of 1789, when Mozart was 33 – just two short years before his death (Così was first performed in Vienna on January 26, 1790, a day before Mozart turned 34).   One cannot but stop and contemplate in amazement how different the history of classical music would have been had he lived another 20 years.  This was not to be, but in the 30 years that he had been composing (his father Leopold wrote down some piece that Wolfgang composed – and played on the piano – at the age of five), he created a body of work unparallel in the history of music.

It’s rather pointless to try to select "the best of Mozart," so we’ll present several performances from recent uploads. The husband-and-wife piano duo Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung perform Sonata for Piano Four-Hands in C Major K. 521 is from 1787 (here).  Piano Trio in B-flat Major, K.502 was written a year earlier.  It’s performed by Yoon-Jung Yang , violin, Hiro Matsuo, cello, and Helen Huang, piano (here).  Sonata in C Major for Violin and Piano K. 303 is considered one of Mozart’s "mature" violin sonatas.  He was just 22 when he wrote it (in 1778), but by then he had already written 19 violin sonatas.  Here it’s performed by the violinists Ariana Kim with Ieva Jokubaviciute on the piano.  And finally, an old recording of Six Variations on "Salve Tu, Domine" K. 398 made by the great Russian pianist Emil Gilels.  It was brought to us by Istituto Europeo di Musica.   Listen to it here.

January 2, 2012.  Happy 2012!  Thanks to the tradition of the Vienna Philharmonic concerts, New Year’s music tends toward Johann Strauss Jr. and the 19^th century operetta.  As much as we enjoy Vienna, this is not the kind of music we love.  So we turn again to Bach’s magnificent Christmas Oratorio: Part IV was written for the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, which falls on New Year's day, and Part V – for the first Sunday of the New Year.  Here is the opening chorus from Part IV, Fallt mit Danken, fallt mit Loben (Fall Down in Thanks, Fall Down in Praise).  And here is the first movement (Chorus) Ehre sei dir, Gott, gesungen (Let your glory be sung out, oh God) from Part V.  Both are performed by English Baroque Soloists the Monteverdi Choir under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner (courtesy of YouTube).

Pictured on the left is St. Nicholas church in Leipzig. It’s interesting that during Bach’s time the only complete performance of the Oratorio took place in St. Nicholas (it happened between December 25, 1734 and January 6, 1735).  Only four parts were performed in Bach’s own church of St. Thomas.  Two and a half centuries later, in 1989, St. Nicholas became the center of demonstrations against East Germany’s Communist regime, which in the end brought down Berlin Wall.