Sonata Form

These works, often thought of in terms of being ‘immature’, are currently under recorded. This is a pity because although lacking in the depth of Vivaldi’s next opus, the masterwork ‘L’Estro armonico’, these sonatas are sophisticated and artful studies.

Johann Baptist Vanhal's clarinet sonatas are mostly notable for their historical value. Written between 1801 and 1810, they legitimized the clarinet as an equal partner in the sonata form. They did for that instrument what Beethoven did for the cello around the same time. Until the turn of the century, the clarinet had mainly appeared in ensembles with multiple other instruments, like the great quintets of Mozart and Weber.

Steven Isserlis is a splendid cellist with a consummate technique and a focused, intense tone capable of infinite variety. He's an enterprising, imaginative musician with a penchant for centering programs on a single composer or national idiom. He has recorded French sonatas for Virgin Classics, and for RCA, the works of Mendelssohn, John Taverner, Haydn, and Czech and Russian composers. On his latest CD, Isserlis performs four relatively unfamiliar compositions of Saint-Saëns. Unfortunately, obscure works by a good composer are usually neglected for a reason.

Jennifer Pike, who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition at the tender age of 12, appears to have survived the perils of prodigyhood and entered her early twenties with musical intelligence intact. Here she offers a terrific program of music from the middle of the 19th century; all of it is abstract, but it brings vividly to mind the crucial trio of creative figures who met in the early 1850s: the ailing Robert Schumann, his musically frustrated wife Clara, and the young Johannes Brahms, mooning over the latter.

Customarily, the booklet notes for recordings containing music transcribed for instruments other than those for which it was written make the argument that such transcriptions were normal, accepted, and so on, in the years when the music was written. The ones for this disc make the same argument, but it's not so relevant in this case – the musicians here join performance style to transcription in an effort to make something new, not just to fill a hole in the cellist's repertory (Mozart never wrote anything for solo cello). The transcriptions from Mozart's sonatas for violin and keyboard were made by cellist Alexander Kniazev, but it is pianist Edouard Oganessian who sets the tone for much of the music.

It was the Bachs who launched the harpsichord on its career as a concerto soloist and the sons did not wait to follow in father's wake; the first of Carl Philipp Emanuel's 52 concertos, spanning more than 50 years, probably just predates the first of JSB's. Neither did they pursue the practice of having more than two soloists. In his F major Concerto (the numbering of which differs from that given in Grove: H410, Wq46) CPE accepts the formal plan of the ritornello but not the concept of its unity of thematic mood; he introduces a diversity that is more like that of the exposition in sonata form—though the resemblance ends there, and the element of contrast is maintained in the 'solo' episodes, not derived from the ritornello material.