Emotional Violin

With Sarah Chang's celebrity as a child prodigy somewhat faded and her musicianship matured, she can forgo recording encore albums and at last get to work on some serious material. That she does, and quite brilliantly, on this EMI album of violin sonatas by Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Ravel. With the solid support of her accompanist Lars Vogt, Chang delves into these French masterpieces with confidence and intense feeling, and the two performers imbue the works with spontaneity, excitement, and lifelike presence.

Perhaps I am too much a fan of Mordkovitch to be an unbiased reviewer… She and Wallfisch are taking their duos slower than Oistrakh and Fournier, than Stern and Rose and even than Szeryng and Starker. This gives this very much a feeling of a concerto, less feeling of a symphony with obligati violin and cello. With slow tempos, there is a risk of the structure falling apart. But I think so much beauty is won here, that I'm willing to sacrifice some structure; on an emotional level I find the result more moving, not less.

Though written almost contemporaneously, the violin sonatas of Richard Strauss and César Franck stem from different ends of the two composers' careers. The Strauss sonata was written while the composer was still a young man, at about the same time of his tone poem Don Juan. It is a sonata of youthful enthusiasm, still bearing the remnants of his training studying the works of the Classical and early Romantic masters while hinting at the rhythmic and tonal complexity that was to come in his more mature writing. The Franck sonata, by contrast, was written late in the composer's life and demonstrates Franck's developed style.

Saint-Saëns's chamber music broke new ground in France at a time when public taste tended to favour opera and opéra-comique. His first Sonata for violin and piano, one of the earliest composed in France, is a masterpiece of boundless beauty. Its emotional impact and its highly poetic content are served by the composer’s perfect mastery of formal architecture. (It has also been proposed as the model for the ‘Vinteuil Sonata’ which runs through Marcel Proust's novel cycle ‘In Search of Lost Time’.) The second Sonata, composed in Egypt, is very different from its predecessor: more serious, classical, and intimate. While the writing is more melodic, the composer prophesied that the sonata would not be understood “until the eighth hearing”.

Brzezinski's best work is undoubtedly his violin sonata - a work of searing expressiveness and emotional turbulence, especially in the central adagio which, towards the end, seems to paraphrase the lovely cantilena of Max Bruch's Adagio Appassionato op.57. The sonata by Brzezinski's contemporary and friend Józef Szulc (the Polish spelling of the German name 'Schultz') is his only known work in this or any genre. According to the booklet notes, it "lies on the border of light music and classical" (sic), but a rather sniffy view like this does not stand up well to scrutiny, even if the second half of the work does not quite replicate the poetic heights of the first.

Kerson Leong recently participated in the award-winning Tribute to Ysaÿe (FUG758). Here is his first solo recital for Alpha. The young Canadian violinist’s career began at the age of thirteen when he won the First Prize of the Junior division of the Menuhin Competition in Oslo in 2010. In 2018 he was named artist-in-residence with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. An associate musician at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, under the mentorship of Augustin Dumay, he has already performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Verbier Festival and Wigmore Hall.