Content area
Full Text
RESPIGHI Violin Sonatas: in d; in b. 5 Pieces. 6 Pieces: Valse caressante, Serenata * Tanja Becker-Bender (vn); Péter Nagy (pn) * HYPERION 67930 (72:16)
Ottorino Respighi's First Violin Sonata comes from his late teens, when, according to Nigel Simeone, he studied composition with Luigi Torchi, having also been a violin student and a member of Bologna's orchestra. The early work, cast in three movements, sounds romantic, echoing the works popular at the time in its violinistic requirements and expressive clockwork (octaves at climactic moments, for example). Tanja Becker-Bender and Péter Nagy play with the high seriousness the work seems to demand, strenuously pressing forward in its first movement. Becker-Bender draws an edgy tone from the lower range of the 1728 Guarneri del Gesù upon which she plays and what may seem to many to be a correspondingly hard, glassy one from its upper registers. In the slow movement, however, she and Nagy communicate a sense of the music's urgent expressivity as well as its more somber sensitivity. The third movement, marked Scherzo, serves, according to the notes as a finale-but did the young composer intend this brief, relatively light-weight movement as the ending of such a high-flying sonata? In any case, the piece blends a playfulness in its main subject (does this recall Johannes Brahms's Third Sonata?) with subtle...