A fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.

It’s very unusual to find all Honegger’s Violin Sonatas — which includes the solo sonata of 1940 — grouped together in one disc. In fact I’m not aware of another such coupling in the current catalogue, which gives this budget price entrant cachet. Even better, the performances are persuasive and finely played and recorded.
 
This would amount to a recommendation even were the music not so attractive, which is not to say it’s transparent, as there are moments of occlusion and introspection along the way. The First Sonata is actually the unnumbered D minor of 1912. I agree wholly with Anyssa Neumann’s booklet notes that the opening embeds genuine ‘pathos’—it’s the pathos of popular song, in my view, to which Laurence Kayaleh responds with pervasive and elegant portamenti and effusive lyric intensity. There’s a degree of agitato in this work and Brahmsian striving, and it’s understandable that it was not published during Honegger’s lifetime in a sense, given the influences. But it’s still a big, confident utterance from the young composer. The slow movement is engagingly done, with its odd Delian moments, and the March section is well characterised. The confident and puckish finale is interrupted by a moment of baroque reportage, before a nobly conceived maestoso sweeps us to the finish. As she does throughout, Kayaleh plays with a refined tonal palette. She doesn’t make a big sound, but it is finely coloured.
 
The first numbered sonata was written during the last two years of the First World War. It’s a more focused work, less effusive, and sites the fast movement centrally between two essentially slow ones. The central panel of the Presto is played with the mute, and the whole thing is freely ruminative, though I detect Franck still in his musical handwriting. Stark intoning begins the finale, and here Kayaleh powerfully intensifies her vibrato width. It’s hard not to read into this movement something of the same spirit, but not the same means, that informs John Ireland’s contemporaneous Second Violin Sonata.
 
By contrast the 1919 Second Sonata has rather dreamlike qualities. It takes in a fugal moment, whilst remaining strongly chromatic, indeed compact in its reach — it’s 12 minutes in length in this performance. The finale’s ebullience removes the rather heavy atmosphere brilliantly, fully conveyed by Kayaleh and Paul Stewart. The solo sonata is becoming ever more popular and this performance will not harm that status in any way. What I like especially is the generosity of her grazioso phrasing in the Allegretto; delightfully done.
 
So if you lack these sonatas, or are curious about Honegger’s approach to them, this disc will stand as a fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International  

Beethoven: Works for Violin

Raasted: Solo Violin Sonatas

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Sigrid Kuulmann started her violin studies at the age of seven. She studied at the Estonian Academy of Music, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and at Robert Schumann Hochschule in Dusseldorf. Her teachers include Tiiu Pe�ske, Yfrah Neaman and Rosa Fain, a former pupil of David Oistrakh. Sigrid Kuulmann is a laureate of Heino Eller International Violin Competition in Tallinn and is gaining further accolades for her performances of Estonian music, especially in Eduard Tubin's works. She has performed as a soloist with conductors Neeme Je�rvi, Andres Mustonen etc, and given recitals in England, Germany, Scandinavia and Estonia.

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Works for violin and piano are an important part of Cyril Scott’s chamber music. This disc presents three sonatas which span his output. The capricious and ruminative First Violin Sonata ranks among the most convincing and successful of his earlier large-scale compositions. Sonata Melodica is a more relaxed yet equally quixotic work, while the Third Violin Sonata is one of the most inventive from his later years.

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Transcribed for Guitar.

Schumann: Complete Works for Violin and Orchestra

Fragmentary, kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory … creates a wonderfully atmospheric sense of colliding realities.

REVIEWS:

3411070.az_CORIGLIANO_Violin_Concerto.html

CORIGLIANO Violin Concerto, “The Red Violin 1.” Phantasmagoria: Suite from The Ghosts of Versailles • JoAnn Falletta, cond; Buffalo Phil O; 1 Michael Ludwig (vn) • NAXOS 8559671 (61:02)

John Corigliano composed the score to The Red Violin, which turned out to be a masterpiece in its own right. Then, in 1997, with work on the score already completed while shooting on the film continued, Corigliano composed a new, 17-minute piece he called The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra based on the chaconne progression he’d written for the film. But Corigliano wasn’t done with his Chaconne. Not wishing it to remain a stand-alone piece like Chausson’s Poème , Ravel’s Tzigane , or Beethoven’s Romances, he decided to write three new movements, using the Chaconne as the first movement of a substantive, nearly 40-minute-long violin concerto. And that is what we have here on this disc.

The violin the soloist here, Michael Ludwig, plays, is an 18th-century Lorenzo Storioni, from which the violinist draws a tone that is both liquid and penetrating. One could argue that Corigliano’s concerto is owned by Joshua Bell, for he has been more closely associated with it and more directly involved with the composer than Ludwig, or, for that matter, anyone else. Still, much as I appreciate Bell’s playing in general, I feel there are moments in this piece where he applies the schmaltz a little too thickly. Ludwig resists that temptation, and I think the concerto emerges the better for it.

From the opening of Corigliano’s Phantasmagoria , a suite extracted from the composer’s largely successful opera The Ghosts of Versailles , you’d never guess that this creepy, slithery music sets the stage for what is essentially a “comedy.” As a work detached from its literary references and stage setting, Phantasmagoria becomes a virtuoso showpiece for orchestra. The piece seems to divide into two approximately equal halves. Much of the first half is busy, bustling, noisy, and nutty; the second half, from 13:03 to the end, is calmer, more lyrical, and takes on the feeling of fate accepted, which it is in the opera as Marie is beheaded a second time and reunited with Beaumarchais in Paradise.

Strongly recommended.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

The Buffalo Philharmonic plays throughout with confident assurance under JoAnn Falletta’s baton. Assuming these are live performances ensemble and accuracy in these highly complex scores is excellent. In the spirit of even-handed fairness I should say I have read reviews of this disc elsewhere which make a point of praising the engineering reckoning it to be of award-winning standard. I cannot share that view but as with so many aspects of music; it is all a matter of taste. The Concerto is a very impressive work and one written with a great deal of care and love by John Corigliano – a wonderful tribute to his father. This Corigliano Concerto is right up there and hopefully its appearance on the Naxos with the benefits of distribution and affordability that brings will ensure many more music-lovers will get to hear this powerful and compelling work.

-- Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

BEETHOVEN; SIBELIUS. IDA HAENDEL, VIOLIN; CZECH PHILHARMONIC; KAREL ANCERL, CONDUCTOR. VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR, OP. 61 (RECORDED 1959); VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MINOR, OP. 47 (RECORDED 1959).

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