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Track(s) taken from CDH55362

Violin Sonata No 1 in D major, Op 11

composer
1877; written for Ludwig Straus who gave the first performance with Stanford at the Cambridge Guildhall on 18 May 1877

Paul Barritt (violin), Catherine Edwards (piano)
Recording details: October 1997
St George's, Brandon Hill, United Kingdom
Produced by Andrew Keener
Engineered by Mike Hatch
Release date: June 1999
Total duration: 22 minutes 44 seconds

Cover artwork: Harvesting Scene by Howard Gull Stormont (active 1884-1923)
Private Collection
 

The Violin Sonata was first performed at a Cambridge University Musical Society chamber concert at the Cambridge Guildhall on 18 May 1877 by Ludwig Straus and Stanford and was repeated in London on 6 November; Hermann Franke, a pupil of Joachim and friend of Richter, also performed both the Violin and Cello Sonatas at his celebrated chamber concerts in London in 1882. The main frustration for Stanford, however, was securing a publisher. Writing to Alfred Littleton at Novello, he declared: ‘A good many people have asked me to publish my violin sonata; and before I offer it to a German publisher, I should like to know if you would undertake its publication.’ But Stanford knew only too well that publication of chamber music in England was a rarity and that it would be necessary to court a German publisher. After some negotiation it was taken by Ries of Dresden.

By the time Stanford came to write this Violin Sonata he was still in the process of consolidating the roots of his musical language. Although assimilation of Brahms’s classical romanticism had begun in earnest—a fact attested by the steady succession of performances by CUMS of Brahms’s works—it would be several years before it was fully digested. More conspicuous at this point in his stylistic development is a veneration of Beethoven and, most of all, Schumann. Through Beethoven’s instrumental works (and Kiel’s sterling instruction) Stanford had gained a thorough understanding of structural control and classical equipoise, but having mastered these essential principles it was to Schumann that he looked for harmonic resource, poetic gesture and lyrical intensity. This gravitation is clearly evident in the eight songs from George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy, Op 1 (1872–4), the Heine songs, Op 4 (1874), the Toccata for piano, Op 3 (1875), the Phantasiestücke ‘Charivari in Dresden’ (1875) and most of all in the first Symphony (1876), effectively the climax of his student years. The largely successful diffusion of Beethoven and Schumann in the first Symphony is also perceptible in this Violin Sonata No 1.

The first movement’s opening octave gesture, coupled with the precipitate shift to F sharp major after fourteen bars, suggests the influence of Beethoven, as does the reworking of this material on the development and coda. The second group of ideas in the dominant is, however, of a much more romantic frame of mind, looking more readily to the rhythmic and harmonic formulae of Schumann. The slow movement, a variation structure, provides yet another instance of classical method, in which the models of Beethoven and Brahms must have played a part (particularly in the process of gradual expansion and ‘alienation’), but the miniature framework is more suggestive of a Schumannesque romance or fantasy. The finale is even more indebted to Schumann for its devices and capricious handling of sonata form. The derivation of the opening thematic material from the slow movement recalls numerous instances in Schumann’s instrumental works (the two Violin Sonatas in A minor, Op 105, and D minor, Op 121, included) as does the unexpected beginning in the tonic minor. A sense of fantasy also pervades the development whose conventional process of reworking is truncated by the introduction of an entirely new thematic idea in D flat. This in turn gives rise to a spacious augmentation of the melody accompanied by energetic figurations in the piano that sound almost cadenza-like.

from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 1999

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