courtesy of Naxos of America
Readers with relatively long memories may recall the interest I took when Brilliant Classics shifted from providing “reprint” anthologies to producing original recordings. One of the first of these releases was an album consisting of the complete music for violin and piano by Karol Szymanowski. This came out in May of 2015, back when I was writing for Examiner.com. The performers on this album were both Portuguese, violinist Bruno Monteiro and pianist João Paulo Santos. By the time their second album was released, Examiner.com had closed; and I was able to write about them on this site. That second album was another “complete works” release, this time covering Erwin Schulhoff’s compositions for violin and piano.
I have now caught up with this duo by listening to the album they released this past May. This is not a “complete works” program. Rather it samples two compositions by Guillaume Lekeu, a late nineteenth-century Belgian composer that died at the age of 24 but left behind about fifty completed works.
When this album was released, Lekeu was not a stranger to me. Ironically, I had learned about him when violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien made their album of the complete works for violin and piano composed by Maurice Ravel for Hyperion Records. Because that content was not enough to fill a single compact disc, they provided an “overture” of sorts in the form of Lekeu’s G major violin sonata, composed between 1892 and 1893. (Lekeu would die on the day after his 24th birthday in January of 1894, having contracted typhoid fever from a contaminated sorbet.) Since Lekeu’s death preceded Ravel’s earliest sonata for violin and piano, his sonata preceded the entire Ravel corpus on the Hyperion release.
I therefore welcomed the opportunity to listen to an album devoted entirely to Lekeu’s music. The first half of the recent Brilliant release consists of an account of that G major sonata by Monteiro and Santos. This is followed by a somewhat earlier composition, a piano trio in C minor composed between 1889 and 1891. For this performance Monteiro and Santos are joined by cellist Miguel Rocha. By way of chronological context, Lekeu had visited Bayreuth to see performances of operas by Richard Wagner in August of 1889; and after his return he began private lessons in counterpoint and fugue with César Franck, who would later die while Lekeu was working on his trio.
There are those that associate Lekeu and his G major sonata with the sonata by the fictitious composer Vinteuil that figures significantly in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. However, Proust began work on this project in 1909 and was familiar enough with concert performances that any number of candidates for Vinteuil had been proposed. For my part I had not heard of Lekeu when I set about to read Proust, so I was content to think about other composers from the late nineteenth century! (I seem to recall listening to chamber music by Camille Saint-Saëns while reading Proust.)
Taken as a whole, this is definitely an album of discovery. Because I tend to seek significance in chronology, I probably would have preferred to have the trio precede the sonata, rather than follow it. On the other hand the trio is the longer work, and I find that I have encountered a variety of ways in which Lekeu chose to go beyond traditional approaches to structure. The sonata, on the other hand, was the result of a commission by Eugène Ysaÿe; and it tends to be the more accessible of the two pieces on the album. Consequently, there may have been some logic behind the decision of the performers to draw upon the sonata to “introduce” Lekeu to listeners encountering his music for the first time.
Nevertheless, regardless of motives and contexts, each of these two selections makes for a thoroughly absorbing listening experience in its own right.
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