Hyperion Records

While the four violin sonatas are essentially intimate works, the B minor Rondo (or Rondeau brillant, as it was dubbed by the publisher Artaria), and the C major Fantasy are rare display pieces from this least showy of composers. Both were inspired by the young violin virtuoso Josef Slavík (or Slawjk), who in 1826 left his native Bohemia to make a career in Vienna. A few years later Chopin admiringly dubbed him ‘a second Paganini’. Dating from October 1826, the Rondeau brillant was first performed by Slavík and Karl Maria von Bocklet in a concert organized by Artaria early in 1827. (Bocklet would later take the piano parts in the premieres of both Schubert trios.)

Cast in two lengthy sections—an Andante introduction and an Allegro in sonata-rondo form—the Rondo in B minor is Schubert at his most extrovert and rhetorically forceful. Its technical demands are of a different order from the works of 1816–17, with the piano sometimes treated as a surrogate orchestra. The introduction begins imposingly with echoes of a French Baroque overture, before softening into a long-spun, Italianate cantilena. The question posed by its final two notes is resolved by the rondo Allegro, music of unflagging rhythmic energy, by turns skittish and strenuous, leavened by moments of stillness and harmonic poetry. The second theme, introduced by the piano against hyperactive violin figuration, could have strutted straight out of a Schubert Marche militaire. After a reminiscence of the introduction’s cantilena and a reprise of the rondo theme comes a central episode in G major whose affable tune is truculently developed through a daring spectrum of keys. The rondo theme makes a final appearance before the march kick-starts the barnstorming Più mosso coda.

from notes by Richard Wigmore © 2013