Laureate Recital
Michiko Kamiya &
Ian Brown
The works that Beethoven wrote for violin and keyboard cover a period
from about 1792, when he first arrived in Vienna, up to 1819, the time of the Hammerklavier
Sonata. The most significant part of this repertoire must be the ten
sonatas, which, although uneven in quality, represent a major contribution to
the literature of the violin sonata. Here Beethoven, who had also been trained
as a string-player at home in Bonn and seems to have taken further lessons in Vienna,
was able to provide music in which both violinist and pianist fully shared,
neither serving as accompanist to the other.
The first set of three sonatas for violin and piano was written in the
years 1797 and 1798 and published by Artaria in the following year. The set is
dedicated to the influential Court Composer Antonio Salieri, with whom
Beethoven had studied Italian word-setting. The second work in the group, the Sonata
in A major, opens with a whimsical theme, accompanied by the violin, which
soon joins in to share the melody with the piano, to be followed by a second
subject. The central development of the movement is much concerned with figures
from the first subject, rising to a point where the original material can be
reintroduced in a recapitulation. The A minor slow movement allows the piano to
announce an eight-bar theme, which the violin repeats. This serves as an outer
framework for a middle section in which piano and violin work in imitation of
one another. This is followed by a finale in the original key, offering a
principal theme of almost ingenuous outline, surrounding contrasting
intervening episodes of greater dramatic intensity.
Franz Schubert was the only one of the great classical composers of the
turn of the century to have been born in Vienna, where he spent the greater
part of his short life. His parents, however, had moved to the city, his father
to join his brother as a schoolmaster. After his schooling as a chorister of
the Imperial Chapel, Schubert seemed destined for the same trade, from which he
generally managed to escape, passing much of his time in the company of
friends, contemporaries who shared many of his own interests. The closing
months of 1816 had brought him a temporary respite from the drudgery of the
classroom, when he was persuaded by his friend Franz von Schober to take
advantage of his mother's hospitality and live in relative freedom, at least
for the time being. In 1817, the year of the Duo Sonata in A major, later
published as Opus 162, publishers showed little interest in Schubert's music,
but it was in this year that he met the older singer, Johann Michael Vogl, of
the court opera, now nearing retirement from the stage and willing to perform
on the modest scale of the Viennese salon, an important connection. The Duo
Sonata followed the three more modest sonatinas or sonatas of 1816 and
shares its musical tasks between violin and piano. As so often with Schubert,
there is something song-like about the first theme offered by the violin in the
opening Allegro moderato, followed by further musical ideas before a
brief central development and an orderly recapitulation. The second movement is
a Scherzo, placed here to provide a contrast that proximity to the last
movement would not here allow. There are surprises of key, as the E major Scherzo
gives way to a C major Trio, approached chromatically by the violin.
After the return of the Scherzo section an Andantino follows,
shifting from its original C major to D flat and then to A flat, dominated by
its returning principal theme. The sonata ends with an Allegro vivace, something
of a scherzo in mood and character, if not in form, and avoiding the prolixity
of some of Schubert's finales. The movement explores, in its course, the wider
harmonic vocabulary that was always apart of his musical language.
Once known as the French Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns was a
precocious virtuoso pianist as a child and as a composer showed, throughout a
long life, an amazing versatility and technical assurance, as he turned his hand
to a variety of genres. The first of his two violin sonatas, the Sonata in
D minor, Opus 75, written in 1885, came at a time when he was at the height of
his powers, the period of the famous Organ Symphony and of a private jeu
d'esprit that he himself deprecated but that has retained amazing
popularity, The Carnival of the Animals. The sonata has the composer's
usual clarity of texture and sureness of technique and makes considerable
technical demands on the violinist, particularly in its brilliant conclusion.
The first movement opens with a flourish, leading to a more lyrical secondary
theme, in marked contrast with the opening material. This leads into an Adagio
of continued melodic interest, carried forward by the violin, which makes
its occasional additional rhapsodic comment. This is followed by a Scherzo movement,
with a trio section that allows the piano to add its own more rapid figuration
to a sustained violin melody, before the return of the opening section of the
movement. A transitional passage leads to the final Allegro molto, a
study in perpetual motion, in which both instruments have their share.
In 1850 Robert Schumann took up his first official position as director
of music in the city of Düsseldorf, accompanied there by his wife, the distinguished
pianist Clara Schumann, and his growing family. The first years, at least, were
fruitful, although there was an occasional return of his earlier depressions,
leading finally in 1854 to a suicide attempt and subsequent relative isolation
in an asylum until his death in 1856. In 1851, however, an optimistic and
productive year, he wrote his third symphony, the Rhenish, his third
piano trio, the wonderfully evocative Märchenbilder and his first two
violin sonatas. In these last Schumann makes no attempt to exploit the
technical possibilities of the violin, preferring rather to use the instrument
at its most expressive in music that has much in common with the shorter pieces
of his final years. The Sonata No. 1 in A minor starts with an
expressive first movement, the passionate principal theme played first in the
lower register of the violin. It is from this material that the rest of the
movement develops, with a second subject that shares elements in common. These
themes are further developed in the central section of the movement, ending
with augmentation of the first theme, as the recapitulation is ushered in. The
second movement, like the Märchenbilder, seems to have some narrative
content. The gentle Allegretto starts the tale, answered in a livelier
phrase. The key shifts briefly from F major to F minor before the return of the
opening. The following passage adds further excitement to the story, with an
emphatic ending, leading to the re-appearance of the material with which the
movement had opened. In the third movement the piano starts the rapid and
agitated melody, at once imitated by the violin. There are references to the
first movement in music that preserves its continuing tension to a determined
conclusion.
The Polish-born violinist Samuel Dushkin had been adopted as a child by
the American composer, Blair Fairchild, who had fostered his career. In 1930
the director of the publisher Schott's, Willy Strecker, introduced Dushkin to
Stravinsky and encouraged the latter to turn his attention to the composition
of a violin concerto, to be commissioned by Fairchild. This was completed in
the following year, with technical assistance from Dushkin, who was the soloist
in the first performance in Berlin in October 1931. It was after writing this
work that Stravinsky, his interest now stimulated, turned to the composition of
his Duo Concertant, completed in the summer of 1932. The composer
explains in his autobiography his debt both to Charles Albert Cingria's book Petrarch
and to his own love of the ancient pastoral poets of Greece and Rome. The
completed work, which was first performed in October 1932 in Berlin, formed
part of programmes of recitals throughout Europe now undertaken by Dushkin and
Stravinsky. The theme chosen, first heard in the Cantilène, is developed
through the five movements. This opening movement contrasts a lyrical element
with the rapid figuration that surrounds it. The first Eglogue opens
with a sustained note against piano figuration, followed by characteristically
brusquer fragments from the violin, while busy piano figuration continues,
until the music comes to an abrupt end. The second Eglogue opens
lyrically in a slow tempo, a moment of contemplative repose before the lively
and extended Gigue, with its compulsive syncopations and rhythms, broken
by a variation in the dance before the triple rhythm resumes. The Duo
Concertant closes with a tribute to Dionysus in a Dithyrambe, its
gentle and melancholy melody unwinding in no wild dance but in a spirit more
akin to that of early Greek examples of the literary form.
Tōru Takemitsu was a composer of great originality, combining a
variety of experimental modern techniques and ideas rooted in early Japanese
musical traditions. It was in 1951, the year in which he wrote Distance de
Fée (‘Distance of Fairy’), that he began formal collaboration with Fumio
Hayasaka and Yoritsune Matsudaira, both experienced composers, some years his
senior. Distance de Fée, for violin and piano, written in the same year,
is one of his earliest published compositions and marks a step in his development
to an idiom entirely his own in his interest in timbres, textures and the use
of silence, generally avoiding any trace of conventional formal structure.
The violinist Joseph Joachim was born at Kitsee, near the modern
Bratislava, in 1831 and gave his first public recital in Pest at the age of
seven. In 1843, after study in Vienna, he began an association in Leipzig with
Mendelssohn, a formative influence on his development. It was here that he was
the soloist in concerts directed by Mendelssohn with the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
An international career took him first to Weimar as leader of Liszt's orchestra
and then to Hanover, as violinist to the King. His meeting with Brahms led to
the introduction of the latter to Joachim's friends in Düsseldorf, Robert and
Clara Schumann. Joachim's friendship with Brahms continued, more or less
unbroken, apart from one notable disagreement, until the latter's death in
1897. As a composer Joachim wrote relatively little and that principally for
the violin. His Three Pieces, Opus 2, were written about the year 1850.
The charming Romanze is the first of the group.
Born in Lublin in 1835, the violinist Henryk Wieniawski had his training
as a performer and as a composer at the Paris Conservatoire. He was later able
to enrich his own repertoire with a number of characteristic compositions for
violin and orchestra or violin and piano. His second Polonaise brillante, originally
for violin and orchestra, but here arranged by Zino Francescatti, was first
published in 1870 during a period spent largely in Russia, where he served as
court violinist and professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory. From 1875 to
1877 he taught at the Brussels Conservatory, where he succeeded Vieuxtemps. It
was during a tour of Russia in 1880 that he suffered his final illness, dying
in Moscow at the age of 44. The Polonaise was a form familiar enough to
a musician born in Poland and offered possibilities for virtuoso exploitation,
as in Wieniawski's treatment of the dance. Virtuoso works of this kind may be a
reminder of Wieniawski's own motto, Il faut risquer (One must take
risks), his own principle as a performer and, in a sense, in the music he wrote
for the violin.