Sonata Form

This Da Vinci Classics album comprises some of the most famous and beloved masterpieces not only among Chopin’s works, but also in the entire piano literature. True, piano literature without Chopin is hardly imaginable; but Chopin without his Ballades, his Scherzos and his Sonatas would not be Chopin. The programme is composed by four shorter works, each conceived individually while also being one in a set of four similar pieces, and by one larger creation, in the most important form created in Western music, i.e. that of the Sonata.

Opera composer Domenico Cimarosa wrote nearly 90 keyboard sonatas that, until the late twentieth century, were ignored by musicologists as well as performers. It is easy to understand why, when they are compared to contemporary works by Mozart and Haydn. Cimarosa stuck to the one-movement sonata form that was used by Domenico Scarlatti. There is some evidence that Cimarosa considered using the three-movement structure, but no such sonata by him has been found, nor has there been found any indication that some of the single movements should be combined in such a way.

Beethoven constantly calls into question and modifies the notion of time in sonata form. He never repeats himself. The thirty-two sonatas are like a voyage of initiation that runs throughout his creative career, displaying his endlessly inventive imagination. After Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and Sonata in B minor, François- Frédéric Guy offers us a complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, recorded in public at the Arsenal in Metz. This set is the first volume. ‘To play the complete Beethoven sonatas in public represents the most exhilarating project I have attempted, a tremendous artistic and human challenge. Beethoven explores sonic and poetic regions that in my view still remain, even in the early twenty-first century, his “exclusive territory”.