Jennifer Pike / Martin Roscoe ELGAR Violin Sonata VAUGHAN WILLIAMS The Lark Ascending - Violin Sonata

VIOLIN SONATA  -  THE LARK ASCENDING

Jennifer Pike / Tom Poster / Doric String Quartet CHAUSSON Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet - String Quartet

Chausson’s premature death in 1899 in a cycling accident left his String Quartet unfinished. Two movements were complete, with a third needing the helping hand of Vincent d’Indy. It was clearly intended as a four-movement work and is conceived on a grand scale. The Doric make the best possible case for the piece, even where it’s less than polished. This is very much a product of its time, sitting on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, with all the unease that that suggests; it has its hints of Wagner but also echoes of Debussy. The third movement is the weakest, without a particularly pronounced character, which is ironically not helped by d’Indy’s very definite ending, which rounds it off as if it were a true finale rather than the penultimate movement.

The Concert is another matter, however. Chausson’s musical inventiveness amply fills its statuesque dimensions and it never outstays its welcome. There are plenty of opportunities for Jennifer Pike to display her sinuous, tender tone, while Tom Poster reminds us yet again why he’s so highly regarded as a chamber musician: sample from around 4'10" in the finale, where he makes light and highly nuanced work of the filigree that forms a shadowy backdrop to the strings. In some performances it can feel as if the quartet is too small a force to convey the grandeur of Chausson’s vision, but not here, with the Doric revelling in the luxuriant textures. Though I retain a soft spot for the note of disquiet that Graffin brings to the Grave in his recording with the Chilingirian, their reading as a whole doesn’t have the same cumulative impact as the Doric et al. And there’s no contest in the finale, which in the new version has a thrilling one-in-a-bar propulsion. A real front-runner for the Concert, and the most convincing of advocates for the more problematic String Quartet. (Harriet Smith / Gramophone)

Jennifer Pike / Martin Roscoe FRANCK - DEBUSSY - RAVEL

Jennifer Pike, an exclusive Chandos artist and one of the brightest up-and-coming stars on the musical scene today, named BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2002, performs some of the greatest music for the violin in the repertoire. On her first recital recording for Chandos, she partners the distinguished pianist Martin Roscoe, and together they superbly capture the Gaelic qualities of the violin sonatas by Franck, Debussy, and Ravel.

The Violin Sonata in A by César Franck was written in 1886 as a wedding present for the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Sensuous, yet spiritual and serene, this is a triumphant example of cyclic form in four movements: a languid Allegretto, a fiery Allegro, a Recitativo-Fantasia recalling earlier themes, and a gentle finale which is one of the finest examples of a canon written after Bach. The 1886 premiere took place in an art gallery in Brussels, in a room so dark that Ysaÿe was forced to play the sonata largely from memory.

The Violin Sonata was the third and last completed of a projected set of six sonatas for various instruments, on which Debussy embarked in 1915, three years before his death. Compared to the sonatas by Franck and Ravel, this work is very different in terms of the freedom and fantasy expressed in its ideas and structure. It may have been inspired in part by a gypsy fiddler whom Debussy heard on a visit to Budapest; indeed the violin writing in the central movement incorporates a number of ‘gypsy’ traits: trills, slides, and sudden bursts of excitement. This movement presents seventeen different tempo indications in a mere six pages, which highlights Debussy’s strong desire to write music that ‘sounds as if it’s not written down’.

Combining the influence of blues with an austere beauty, the Violin Sonata was Ravel’s final chamber work. In the late 1890s, the young Ravel had written one movement of a violin sonata, but it was not until the 1920s that he completed the work. He worked on the basic premise that the two instruments, violin and piano, being incompatible, should be made as independent from each other as possible, without risking the collapse of the structure. The deliberate lack of relationship between the instruments tested the ears of the critics, and when Ravel took the sonata on his North American tour in 1928, they did not approve – though the work was very well received by its audiences!

Jennifer Pike / JOHANNES BRAHMS - ROBERT SCHUMANN - CLARA SCHUMANN

Jennifer Pike was the youngest-ever winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2002. She has given performances throughout the UK and around the world and, now aged twenty-three, is widely regarded as one of the finest violinists in Britain. The pianist Tom Poster who performs alongside her is well known for his artistry and versatility, equally in demand as a soloist and as a chamber musician. This recital features violin sonatas by Brahms and Robert Schumann as well as Three Romances by Clara Schumann. Robert Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1 is very much a ‘Duo’, the two instrumentalists performing in equal partnership. It was written in 1851 at quite a stressful time in Schumann’s life. There is certainly an air of robustness, even roughness, in the baroque-style finale. By contrast, in Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1, the violin is always the principal voice, the piano never a competitor but rather a subtle accompanist. Brahms wrote the work in memory of his godson Felix Schumann who had died of tuberculosis at the tragically young age of twenty-four. Clara Schumann’s Three Romances was her only work for violin and piano, but whilst the violin is allowed to sing throughout, the complexity of the piano part testifies to its having been composed by a pianist of the first rank.