Hello all,

The centerpiece of the recital program was the famous Sonata in A Major by the French composer Caesar Franck, a piece that is arguably the cornerstone of the entire violin-piano sonata repertoire. It is a monumental sonata, both in length and musical depth, so I am going to present it to you in two separate posts. This week, we will hear the first and second movements. The third and fourth movements will follow next week.

Franck wrote the sonata as a wedding gift for the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye, a towering figure (both musically and physically) in the late 19th-century musical world. Ysaye, who wrote six famous solo violin sonatas of his own, played the Franck sonata on tour in an effort to bring Franck’s music to the broader public. In doing so, he cemented the work as a mainstay of the violin-piano performance repertoire.

The first movement presents, in the violin’s opening lines, one of the main themes of the sonata. It is slow, ethereal, and reflective. Later, you can hear the second main theme of the sonata in the piano. In this movement, Franck perfectly captured the floating, almost vanishing quality typical of turn-of-the-century French composers.

John deserves the majority of the kudos for the second movement, since Franck (a pianist himself) created a piano part that far outpaces the violin part in its complexity and difficulty. From the very first bar of the movement, the piano hurtles through mountains of devilish D-Minor runs and arpeggios, eventually doubling the violin’s offbeat presentation of the turbulent primary theme. There are two interludes in the madness (listen for fragments of the first movement here!), but both eventually resolve into the primary theme after more roiling piano escapades. After a pell-mell race to the finish, the instruments arrive at a triumphant D-Major chord that bookends the harmonic journey of the movement.

Enjoy!

T