Violin Piano

“Schubert’s music is always associated in my imagination with a journey in a horse-drawn carriage. Outside, the scenery is flowing by. Cities, mountains, rivers, lakes, villages. At times the carriage slows down, then it speeds up again, but I always have that feeling of being on a journey. Not on foot and not on horse, but in a carriage on wheels.” (Elena Bashkirova)

Between 1849 and 1853 Robert and Clara Schumann wrote a series of striking and imaginative works for violin and piano. Clara’s expressive Romanzen explores the violin’s lower and middle range, while Robert’s own set of the same name balances turbulence with melancholy. His concentration at this time on Hausmusik also led to the Fantasiestücke, originally cast for clarinet, and the fairy-tale narratives of Märchenbilder. The passionate complexity of the Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor suggests new musical paths the composer didn’t live to fully explore. Violinist Haoli Lin is an internationally recognized talent.

Respighi’s orchestral music is loved for its lavish, operatic ‘fireworks’, its pomp and circumstance. This recording of his music for violin and piano demonstrates a more tender and intimate side to the composer, and also shows what a master he was of melody. Respighi had many influences from all over Europe and an enthusiasm for German music which perhaps explains the pleasing echoes of Brahms and Schumann among others. The sonatas, especially the later in B minor, are important works of nineteenth-century chamber music, and gems such as the Valse caressante and the Serenata are suffused with lyrical elegance which is perfectly carried off by the wonderful violinist Tanja Becker-Bender.

Dvorák's music for violin and piano comes from many periods in his career. An early Sonata in A minor of 1873 is lost. Of the works which do survive, several, including the Notturno and Four Romantic Pieces, are skilful arrangements of earlier works (the Notturno is a reworking of the central section of the E minor String Quartet, while the Four Pieces were originally written for viola and piano).

The 20th-century Lithuanian composer’s dialogue between modern forms of expression and folk motifs is well represented in the four works in this recording. There is a sense of playful lightness in the Romantic aesthetic of Gruodis’s work, while Banaitis incorporates national lyricism with personal grief in his Sonata. Composed under the restrictions imposed by Soviet occupation, Vainiūnas’s Sonata Op. 38 is suffused with tragedy and sorrow, while the distinctive style of Juzeliūnas had an enormous impact on the future of Lithuanian music. All of these pieces are symbolic of survival and represent being truthful to one’s creative identity while under the harshest of conditions.