Janáček — Brahms — Bartók: Violin Sonatas (Alpha-Classics/Outhere)
★★★★☆
🎧 Spotify | Apple Music
Spot the odd man out right here (the final two phrases might be learn as a manufacturing credit score).
Janáček and Bartók occupied a tranche of east-central Europe, sharing a riff of off-beat rhythms and a penchant for quarter-tones, nearly atonal. Brahms did none of those. He was a Hamburger by origin, inclination and food plan. What he’s doing on this Slav-Baltic sandwich album is frankly unfathomable.
The performers, Fazil Say and Patricia Koptachinskaya, are respectively Turkish and Moldavian, shut sufficient to Janáček and Bartók. PatKop’s violin assault within the 1914 Janáček sonata is so edgy it’s nearly off the cliff. Say throws her a determined security rope. She ignores it, taking part in even near the precipice.
This isn’t, by any stretch of my creativeness, simple listening. Life was onerous within the Carpathians and the composer means you to listen to it. The First World Struggle has simply begun. Take cowl. This efficiency, abrasive as it might be, places the listener proper within the entrance line. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
The Bartók sonata, dated 1921, extracted modernism from tough bucolic sources, a lot as Picasso did in his Blue Interval. Uncompromising in its opening bleakness, it finds eventual reduction within the livid, superspeed propulsion of a near-suicidal finale. PatKop performs it impossibly quick, thrillingly so.
So inform me: what’s Brahms’s mild 1888 sonata doing in the midst of this album? Solutions auf einem Ansichstkarte, bitte. Or sur une carte postale.
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Norman Lebrecht is without doubt one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s a daily presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Avenue Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
