Franck: Violin Sonata & Chausson: Concert

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).