Tasmin Little FAURÉ • LEKEU • RAVEL Martin Roscoe piano Photograph by Clément Ortmans, Verviers, courtesy of Bibliothèque national de France, département Musique Ortmans, France, Clément Bibliothèque national de Verviers, courtesy of Photograph by Guillaume Lekeu, 1890 French Violin Sonatas Guillaume Lekeu (1870 – 1894) Sonata (1892 – 93) 32:28 in G m ajor • in G-Dur • en sol majeur for Violin and Piano À Eugène Ysaÿe 1 I Très modéré – Vif et passionné – Très modéré 11:42 2 II Très lent – [ ] – Tempo I 10:28 3 III Très animé – Très modéré – Très animé (Premier mouvement) – Très modéré – Très animé (Premier mouvement) – Très modéré – Très vite 10:18 Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937) 4 Sonata movement (1897) 14:23 in A minor • in a-Moll • en la mineur for Violin and Piano = 160 – Un peu moins vite = 72 – Très en mesure = 100 – Lente = 60 – Plus animé – Tranquille = 100 – Lento – = 100 – Très marqué = 144 – Plus animé – Premier mouvement = 60 – Tranquille = 100 – Lent = 132 – Encore plus lent e e 3 Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924) Sonata No. 1, Op. 13 (1875 – 76) 26:02 in A major • in A-Dur • en la majeur for Violin and Piano 5 I Allegro molto 8:45 6 II Andante 7:36 7 III Allegro vivo 4:12 8 IV Allegro quasi presto 5:27 TT 72:56 Tasmin Little violin Martin Roscoe piano 4 French Violin Sonatas Fauré: Violin Sonata No. 1 in A, Op. 13 a lot from the twenty or so songs which The Violin Sonata in A has claims to be had preceded this sonata, not only in the regarded as the first masterpiece of Gabriel fashioning of those lines themselves, but Fauré (1845 – 1924). He began it in the summer also in the use of powerful bass octaves and of 1875, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, arpeggio patterns and in the ease with which and for much of the time had the benefit he moves from one idea to another. The of advice from Hubert Léonard, a pupil of overall atmosphere, serious without being Vieuxtemps and a professor at the Brussels morose, brings to mind the name of Brahms – Conservatoire. He finished it the following year with the proviso that Brahms did not write and it was first performed in Paris in January his First Violin Sonata until 1878. 1877 by the violinist Marie Tayau, with Fauré The serious mood is maintained in the playing the piano part. Today this work has Andante, with the opening short-long rhythm such a firm place in the repertoire that it is in the piano dominating the texture. But hard to imagine how bold and adventurous it the scherzo belongs to those light-footed, must have seemed at that time. As the Fauré airy movements pioneered in orchestral scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux has pointed out, music by Mendelssohn and Berlioz and 1875 was the year of the premiere of Bizet’s developed by Debussy and Ravel in their Carmen, rejected by a perplexed Parisian string quartets. We may observe, in the public as being incomprehensibly modern. triple-time section in the middle, that the Unsurprisingly therefore, no French publisher opening theme reappears in longer notes. would accept the sonata, and it was only The last movement seems to draw energy through the efforts of the composer’s friend from Fauré’s favourite off-beat chordal Camille Clerc that it finally found a home with accompaniment and Jean-Michel Nectoux is the German publishers Breitkopf & Härtel – with surely right in saying that ‘in the finales of his no money going to Fauré. later chamber music Fauré rarely matched The sweeping, passionate lines of the first this movement’s easy assurance’. After the movement suggest that Fauré had learnt first performance several colleagues had 5 advised Fauré to lengthen this finale, but Guillaume Lekeu (1870 – 1894) was among he was almost certainly wise to reject their the last arrivals in the bande. After lessons in advice. his home city of Verviers in Belgium, he and his That first performance, given at the family moved to Poitiers and there, at the age Société nationale de musique, was a of fifteen, he composed his first piece. They success ‘beyond my wildest dreams’, he moved again, to Paris, in 1888, when Guillaume wrote, and the scherzo ‘was energetically joined the bande. Between then and his death encored’. Perhaps the best tribute came from from typhoid, after drinking contaminated Saint-Saëns, who told Fauré that water, he wrote some fifty pieces, of which he felt that sadness that mothers feel the Violin Sonata of 1892 – 93 is by far the best when they see their children are too grown- known. up to need them any more! Whether innate or in response to Franck’s It is a pleasure to record that, in this case, example, ‘tremulous emotion’ was decidedly mother and child still had over forty years of a major part of Lekeu’s make-up: visiting mutual devotion before them. Bayreuth in 1889, Lekeu fainted after the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde and had to be Lekeu: Violin Sonata in G carried out of the theatre. He confessed to At the start of the 1890s, French composers not liking music that was pretty but not felt, were largely divided into two groups: and that for him art was entirely a matter of Conservatoire students who looked to feeling. The Violin Sonata, written for the great Massenet as their guiding star; and the Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, declares its so-called ‘bande à Franck’ who followed the programme of sentiment from the opening Belgian master – indeed ‘worshipped’ would phrase – a bold downward octave followed not be too strong a word. The music historian by an upward scale. If there are echoes of Martin Cooper, in his classic account of the Beethoven, Wagner, and, of course, Franck, this period, described the world of Franck as one is only to be expected of an impressionable of tremulous emotion, in which the nobility twenty-two-year-old. Like Franck, Lekeu in the and purity of master and disciples seems to two outer movements proceeds by continual have been permanently – and one cannot modulation, binding the music together with help feeling, rather self-consciously – in cyclic repetitions of material and, especially, evidence. of rhythms: phrases often have their longest 6 note in the middle and end with a triplet. The In the meantime, in April 1897, he began a finale also repeats sixteen bars almost note violin sonata. It has frequently been assumed for note from the first movement during the that he wrote it for his fellow Conservatoire build-up to the final section. and Fauré pupil Georges Enesco – reasonably But perhaps his greatest achievement enough, given that Enesco would premiere the is to be found in the opening theme of the Second Violin Sonata thirty years later. It has central slow movement. Not only does Lekeu also been assumed that the surviving single manage the 7 / 8 (4 + 3) time signature with movement was meant to stand on its own. consummate flexibility, he keeps our interest We now know that neither assumption was through all forty bars and three minutes of the correct. The information comes from a recently melody with only two brief excursions away discovered note which Ravel sent to the violinist from the tonic E flat major. The central section Paul Oberdoerffer in June 1929, consisting of is introduced by a tune on the piano played the opening violin phrase of the movement ‘very simply and with the feeling of a popular and a dedication to him ‘in memory of the 1st song’. In this, Lekeu was following not so much performance of the uncompleted 1st sonata Franck himself, as members of the bande, such (18..)’. Oberdoerffer went on to teach violin at as d’Indy, for whom folksong was the epitome the Conservatoire and wrote light music for his of nobility and purity. instrument, with titles such as ‘Chinoiserie’ and ‘La Petite Fleur de mon jardin’. Ravel: Sonata movement in A minor It is likely that Ravel intended the In June 1895, Émile Pessard, Conservatoire movement to stand first in the Sonata. professor of the twenty-year-old Maurice Ravel Certainly, there is a close kinship between the (1875 – 1937), somewhat condescendingly opening phrase and that of the first movement perhaps, described his harmony exercises as of his Piano Trio of 1914, not least in his use ‘exact’ – Pessard lived on until 1917, perhaps of the Dorian mode, in both cases involving long enough to blush at this judgement. At all F sharp in an overall key of A minor. But one events, in the exam in the summer of 1895 of the most impressive features of this work these exercises were not exact enough for by a twenty-two-year-old is his ability to the jury and Ravel had to leave the institution, match different styles convincingly. Fauré before returning as a member of Fauré’s was renowned for his open-mindedness as composition class in 1898. a teacher, and had no interest in producing 7 clones of himself – the fact that two such Enjoying a flourishing career that has taken different composers as Ravel and Florent her to every continent and major orchestra Schmitt were both his pupils demonstrates around the world, Tasmin Little OBE continues this clearly enough. Although Ravel had not yet to champion seldom-performed repertoire, joined Fauré’s class in 1897, it already contained notably Ligeti’s challenging Concerto which friends of his such as Schmitt, Koechlin, and she has performed with Sir Simon Rattle Roger-Ducasse, and no doubt they spread and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the word of Fauré’s liberal regime.