Isabelle Faust

Alexander Melnikov, Isabelle Faust – Mozart: Sonatas for Fortepiano and Violin (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:48 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

At a time when Mozart was writing his first sonatas for violin and clavier, in 1778, it was the done thing to write piano sonatas with violin accompaniment in which the violin part is fairly unobtrusive. The purpose of this was not to put off the target audience for the scores: educated amateurs. But Mozart paid no heed to this convention and took off into a new world with real duets, in which the two instruments found themselves on an even footing. At the same time, he avoided the corrective exaggeration which would appear in some scores which resembled violin concertos with a little piano support. Here we have a perfect balance between the two players: Isabelle Faust on the violin and Alexander Melnikov at the clavier. The latter of the two plays on a copy of a Viennese fortepiano made in 1795 by Anton Walter. The sound balance is utterly perfect, which is a relief, as all too often these sonatas either favour the keyboard part when played on the piano or the violinist tries to force it. We have here two sonatas written in Paris shortly after the death of Mozart’s mother (who accompanied him on the journey), and then another from 1787 written in the wake of Leopold Mozart’s death. Despite this the composer seems to be putting on a brave face, flashing a smile tinged with a tender nostalgia on the Sonata in E Minor K. 304.
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Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov – Franck: Violin Sonata; Chausson: Concert (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz  | Time – 01:17:05 minutes |1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download  | Digital Booklet | © harmonia mundi

Regular chamber partners Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov, playing on period instruments, shine new light on two major works of chamber music written at the dawn of the 20th century.

The ‘Sonata’ is Franck’s most frequently played and recorded work. Premiered by Eugène Ysaÿe, in Brussels on 16 December 1886, a judge as shrewd as Alfred Cortot was lucid enough to make an arrangement for solo piano. Since then it has been transcribed for nearly every instrument on the planet and is a permanent staple of the repertoire.

Although it is devoid of passages in double stopping or pizzicato, the violin part, replete with treacherous chromatic twists and turns, nonetheless poses formidable difficulties of intonation.

Franck’s influence on Ernest Chausson’s ‘Concert’ is unmistakable. A late-Romantic hybrid, the work blends elements of piano and string quintet styles and here regains a freshness which delicately illuminates, in the hands of Faust and Melnikov. Completed a year after the Symphony in B flat, and again written for Ysaÿe, the ‘Concert’ asserts its roots in the heritage of Rameau and Couperin, thus foreshadowing Debussy’s ‘Hommage à Rameau’ (1905) and Ravel’s ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ (1917).

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