What a treat. I did not know these sonatas, and I had to study them in great depth and detail twice. Niels Gade was the foremost Danish musician and composer of the 19th Century, and teacher of both Grieg and Nielsen. He was friends with Schumann and Mendelssohn. The latter promoted Gade’s music in Leipzig when authorities in Copenhagen dismissed it as “too Germanic”. A formidable violinist, his sonatas for that instrument are brilliant works that clearly show the influence of German romanticism. Each one is substantial—all are at least 20 minutes long. They span Gade’s career—Opus 6 in A is a sunny, youthful work; Opus 21 in D minor is a brooding beast that I think should replace the rather tired-out and overplayed Franck Sonata on modern programs; and Opus 59 is a late, pensive but cheerful piece.

Danish Romantic composer Niels Gade is best known for his orchestral music; the three sonatas for violin and piano recorded here are rarely heard, at least outside of Denmark. But the first of them, at least, attracted performances by both Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann in its own time (the latter with Gade himself on the violin). They cover a span of time from 1842 to 1885. One interesting feature of the set is that the expected stylistic progression is reversed; the freest piece is the Violin Sonata No. 1 in A major, Op. 6, with its wealth of melody, while the second is closer to the vein of Schumann’s chamber music, with clear sonata forms and motivic links among movements. The third sonata is one of those sunny works of old age that seems to look back on the music of a lifetime; it’s a lovely, airy piece. There’s a distinctive mood running through all three works, light but without a hint of the salon. It would be hard to imagine more sympathetic performances than those by Danish musicians Christina Astrand (violin) and Per Salo (piano), and any lover of Romantic-era chamber music will find a valuable collection addition here. The booklet notes, useful but a bit heavy on minutiae of chronology, are in English, German, and Danish.

The intimacy of chamber music—much of which was originally written to be played at home, as a communal event—can sometimes make it more enjoyable to play than to hear. But when there is sufficient joy in the playing, chamber works come through with an emotional immediacy that larger-scale ones do not quite match…Niels Gade’s three violin-and-piano sonatas span a large portion of his career. No. 1 (A major) dates to 1842, when Gade was 25; No. 2 (D minor) is from 1849–50; and No. 3 (B-flat major) is from 1885, five years before the composer’s death. It is scarcely surprising that the works cover very different emotional territory. No. 1 is quite Mendelssohnian (Mendelssohn was a major influence on Gade: Gade was his assistant conductor at the Leipzig Gewandhaus and, after Mendelssohn’s death, his successor) and has a well-designed finale that, surprisingly, is in A minor. No. 2 is more compressed (it is the shortest of the three sonatas) and includes an interestingly designed middle movement that is in part a slow movement and in part a scherzo. No. 3 is musically a bit of a throwback, with youthful joyousness in its themes and without the broad emotionalism of Romantic-era works of its time. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has never been particularly popular, although it is very well constructed. Christina Åstrand and Per Salo play all these works with strength, understanding and a fine sense of balance between the violin and piano parts.