Posted on by tjphilbrick

Franck Sonata – Part 2

Hello all,

This week’s music will be the final two movements of the Sonata in A Major for violin and piano by Caesar Franck, performed by John Donkersloot on piano and myself on violin.

As I mentioned when we listened to the first and second movements last week, Franck presents musical ideas in the earlier movements that are then recycled throughout the remainder of the sonata. The third movement is more chromatic and temperamentally unpredictable than the first two movements, but it also revisits the primary themes that were introduced in the second movement and the opening line of the first movement. The movement is titled Fantasia; listen for the violin’s virtuosic solos at the start.

The fourth and final movement is pure lyricism, pure Romanticism, pure elegance. The initial theme, which flows lightly and gracefully through the opening bars, is presented in a canon. A canon is a musical form in which two instruments play the same melody, but in a staggered form (one following the other, always a few bars behind). After a brief detour into the stormy fantasies of the third movement, Franck brings back the lyrical theme to close the sonata with a swelling, soaring A major flourish.

Enjoy!

T

Posted on by tjphilbrick

Franck Sonata – Part 1

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

Posted on by tjphilbrick

The Duet #2 – Petite Suite

Hello all,

As we continue our series on the great duets in the classical music repertoire, we turn this week to Claude Debussy’s Petite Suite, performed by Christoph Eschenbach and Lang Lang.

Petite Suite is written for one piano and four hands. Debussy premiered it himself, in collaboration with fellow French musician Jacques Durand. There are four movements (not all of which are present in this performance, unfortunately) that evenly feature both pianists.

You will notice that the piece is quite simple and not technically difficult; Debussy is reported to have intended it for an amateur piano-lesson-type audience. It is particularly interesting to note that he wrote this piece shortly after being told by his Paris Conservatory piano instructor that he should focus on composition because he would never make a good pianist.

One of the things that I find most interesting about this composition is its historically anomalous nature. Debussy was a late Romantic-era composer, closely preceded by colleagues who wrote thundering symphonies (Brahms) and soaring concerti (Tchaikovsky). It is therefore curious to experience the simplicity and – as one critic put it – “delightful plainness” of the Petite Suite.

Enjoy!

T