Hyperion Records

The Sonata in A minor, Schubert’s favourite key for expressions of pathos, has a more individual flavour than that of the D major. At the opening of the first movement the violin transmutes the piano’s yearning cantabile into strenuous rhetoric, with vaulting leaps between registers. In the lyrical C major theme that follows Schubert seems to remember, both in the cut of the melody and the subdominant-leaning harmony, the fast section of the Countess’s famous aria ‘Dove sono’ from Le nozze di Figaro. The music then settles in F major for a third theme, beginning as a chirpy dialogue between violin and piano left hand around pulsing triplets in the right. Schubert thus creates an exposition with three, rather than the traditional two, separate key centres (A minor, C major and F major), a trait found in so many of his sonata-form movements, right through to the B flat Piano Sonata and the String Quintet.

The beguiling F major Andante initially evokes the minuet finale of Mozart’s F major Violin Sonata, K377 (which Schubert also remembered a few months later in the Fifth Symphony’s Andante), though the harmonic adventures of its two episodes are pure Schubert. The third movement, in D minor—another unorthodox key choice—is a cussed, laconic Menuetto, more Haydnesque than Mozartian, with a Ländler-style trio underpinned by piquant chromatic harmonies. Opening with a violin song of melancholy grace, the rondo finale has a similar plan to that of the D major Sonata. But its scale is broader, its reach bolder. At the climaxes of the two episodes the instruments hurl rising scales at each other with almost Beethovenian vehemence.

from notes by Richard Wigmore © 2013