Rachel Podger, “the unsurpassed British glory of the baroque violin” (The Times), and Grammy award-winning pianist Christopher Glynn recorded Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano nos. 1, 5 and 10. Following the critically acclaimed Mozart/Jones Sonatas Fragment Completions (2021), this Beethoven album marks Podger and Glynn’s second release together.
On her new album entitled Tutta Sola, violinist Rachel Podger plays solo repertoire from five European composers who all lived to celebrate new year’s eve in 1700. It is a wonderful baroque programme of selected solo violin pieces, preludes, dances and fugal movements. One person, at least with regards to the repertoire for Baroque violin, springs immediately to mind: Johann Sebastian Bach. But the German composer was not the only composer to experiment with ‘senza basso’ – music without accompanying bass –, and neither was he the first.
This issue completes Cooper’s and Podger’s collected recordings of Mozart’s music for keyboard and violin. At first sight, Volumes 7 and 8 might seem to consist of leftovers – Vol 8 devoted to a set of six sonatas (K10-15) written in London when Mozart was eight, and Vol 7, apart from the two variation sets composed shortly after he settled in Vienna, containing a sonata dating from his 1766 stay in The Hague, plus two fragments, completed after Mozart’s death by Maximilian Stadler. In the event, however, both CDs are full of interest.
Rachel Podger, “the unsurpassed British glory of the baroque violin” (The Times), and Grammy award-winning pianist Christopher Glynn recorded Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano Nos. 1, 5 and 10. Following the critically acclaimed Mozart/Jones Sonatas "Fragment Completions" (2021), this Beethoven album marks Podger & Glynn’s second release together…
The Baroque dream team of Rachel Podger and Kristian Bezuidenhout interpret the astonishing music of C.P.E. Bach’s Violin Sonatas in C Minor, B Minor, D Major and G Minor. The two early sonatas here from the 1730s resemble the older style of his father. Listening to these works, you can imagine J.S. Bach glancing over Emanuel's shoulders while he wrote them as a teenager at home in Leipzig. The later sonatas, written 30 to 50 years later, reveal an emancipated composer whose developed musical language embodies the 'Empfindsamer Stil', the directly emotional and rhetorical style characteristic of northern-german music of the time.
It's well known that most of Bach's harpsichord concertos began their lives as violin concertos. Since only three violin originals survive–the ones designated as BWV 1041-43–and since these are among his greatest instrumental works, musical scholars and performers have been reversing the process, turning the harpsichord concertos back into violin originals. BWV 1060 is one such case, a concerto for two harpsichords, which sounds much less clangy and bangy in this reconstructed version for two violins.
The authority on Rameau in the Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians spent a lot of words on these pieces. All YOU have to know is that the usual "continuo" situation of the bass instrument playing the same notes as those found under the harpsichordist's left hand is not present here. This is not a suite with violin on top and bass viol for continuo - but "concerted" harpsichord pieces with the help of a violin and a bass viol. The first and last suites are my favorites, but if you think you like French baroque music, you will thoroughly enjoy the whole disc.