Following her lyrical and witty complete recording of Mozart’s Keyboard Sonatas, issued by naïve in March 2023, Yeol Eum Son invites Svetlin Roussev to join her in the enticingly subtle harmonic intricacies of Germanic post- Romanticism with works written over a period of slightly more than half a century by composers or famous performers upon whom Richard Wagner exercised crucial influence. During their unexpected, fascinating journey, Svetlin Roussev and Yeol Eum Son chart a variety of pathways, from Waxman to Strauss. In 1946 Franz Waxman (Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, Prince Valiant) wrote, at Jascha Heifetz’s request, a paraphrase on themes from Wagner’s Tristan et Isolde, actually an adaptation of a section of the score he composed for the film Humoresque (Warner Brothers, 1947). The programme continues with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a child prodigy in Vienna during the 1910s. The famed Mariettas Lied – the best-known moment in his opera Die tote Stadt – and the sublime nocturne from his incidental music for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (the Scene in the Garden) remain as much moments of lyric intensity as truly cinematographic, deliciously intoxicating love scenes.The keystone of the programme is the magnificent Sonata for Violin and Piano that Richard Strauss composed in 1887. He was 23 years old, and still heavily influenced by Schumann and Brahms, even Grieg.