Hyperion Records

The sound world of the C major Violin Sonata of 1926 assuredly visits the Fauré of fifty years earlier, the opening movement’s easy lyricism and textural transparency bearing a kinship with the elder French musician’s A major Sonata of 1877. Structurally set in a traditional sonata form, both of the themes of the opening movement (Sans lenteur, tendrement) are imbued with Gallic restraint and supple expressivity. The second movement, Véloce (in ternary form with a harp-like central portion), skits across its scherzo terrain with lucidity and no little verve, and an unusual concluding Modéré movement (marked très à l’aise, au gré de l’interprète) is for the most part gentle, melancholic and nostalgic. Such sorrowfulness is broken only by the urgency of a central (interrupted) climax and then (following a wonderfully hypnotic moment of harmonic ‘questioning’) by a foreshortened reprise of the sonata’s opening as the dark clouds of nostalgic longing are dispersed.

from notes by Jeremy Filsell © 2004